Leading Generously

Much agree with Janine here. Plus, how does care intersect with education, arguably the “deliverable” of a university or college? How do we care, how can we practice care within the context of teaching and learning – all of us?

I would also recommend Brittney Cooper’s “Eloquent Rage” – more here:
https://humanities.uconn.edu/2020/07/01/you-should-read-dr-brittney-coopers-eloquent-rage-a-black-feminist-discovers-her-superpower-sharde-m-davis-uconn-communication/
 

Is there time to do a poll/survey/crowd-sourced questioning? Whenever I talk to students, grad and undergrad, for example, about changing the university, I learn SO much about their experiences and ideas, including micro-steps towards more productive engagement, care, building learning communities.

Agree with Katina here. How can those with privilege (tenured faculty, for example) offer to start the action and thereby encourage those for whom it is a real risk to join them? 

You may go into this further down, but organizational psychology has a lot to offer on these topics as well, especially when considering curiosity and learning as collaborative endeavors towards leadership vs. management.

Thank you, Kathleen. Thank you for this paragraph.

This may be arrogant and wrongheaded of me, but if so, so be it… I see more effort to change, including at leadership levels, in libraries than anywhere else in the academy.
I hope you got to talk to Lisa Carter of UW-Madison. She is walking this talk, as best she can under the circumstances.

Adrianna Kezar’s work has a lot to say about this, how it works (and doesn’t) under current notions of institutional leadership.
I cried… a lot… reading How Colleges Change.

As Evviva Weinraub Lajoie framed it, “I struggle with the open-source ethos of ‘if you want to engage, just show up!’ It’s really not that easy” — not least because just showing up is hard when dissenting voices aren’t welcomed.
First, Evviva is the best and I’m so glad her voice is informing this book.
Second… there’s a possible hook here to the concept of “maintenance,” which has a whole bunch of other hooks to gender and race and so on. 
Third… a nod to Tyranny of Structurelessness wouldn’t go amiss. Do-ocracies skew white and cishet male for reasons, frequently refuse to admit to why it happens and how it skews power, and that has unfortunate consequences for them and for all of us. (I won’t rehash the whole code4lib journal library-privacy saga here, but it’s a prime example of a massive do-ocracy fail.)

[[See Daniels, Jr.]
Was this meant to be a footnote?

[But institutions do not automatically deserve to survive based on that mission alone, and particularly not when it becomes evident that they will sacrifice the health and well-being of the people they comprise in order to do so.]
This would be a great place to quote/cite Ettarh on vocational awe.

[But it’s crucial to distinguish between the truly toxic and the more productively critical]
 
Hm. Yes. But sometimes these coexist in the same person, given sufficient time for frustration buildup. That person has absolutely been me. How does a leader take a person with valid critiques who has turned toxic and help get them on a better path?
 
In my case, only changing jobs worked. Whose fault was that? The fault of everyone involved, me emphatically included.

One of the biggest problems with traditional peer review — both of manuscripts under consideration at presses & of faculty under tenure & review processes, but also within professional settings, such as at seminars and conferences, where “status” is performed and assessed in more informal, yet palpably visible ways that are, I would argue, very much in sync with other forms of “peer” review — is that it is always embedded in a chain/cycle in which all of these modes of review are interlocked in ways that are difficult to break through and change. So: tenure & promotion committees have expectations and criteria for review that are essentially unethical & uncharitable & metrics obsessed in certain ways (which I know you & your cohort at MSU, esp. Dean Long, know very well) and university presses understand what these (messed up) criteria and expectations are and they build this in to their own review processes which depends upon the expertise of the very same people who also serve on T&P committees, and who are often anything but generous. And then, post-publication (when successful), the scholar gains “status” through the publication, *if* it with the “right” press, and then the cycle is set to repeat. It has to be reformed at all levels. So what you are doing at MSU with your colleagues is transformative at the college or institutional level. I would just like to see more of a discussion of how institutional forms of review might be transformed in ways that have positive effects all along the cycle(s) of scholarly production. This is a labor issue as well.

Which is all just a way of saying that, in addition to the reforms of review your advocate for here, we’ve also got to reform the ways in which scholars review each others’ work in a fashion conversant with what you sketch out here, where the means should not be the “ends.” & I would go further: we need to transform even what we mean by “means”: we need to widen the ambit and forms of “means” and get rid of markers (as evaluative criteria), such as “status” and “privilege,” that we attached to *places* of scholarly production and output. Only faculty researchers can do this, primarily on their own, but it will certainly help if more schools do what MSU is doing. I don’t see that happening any time soon though, esp. in the humanities. Schools, journals, presses, conferences, etc.: all are earmarked as having or lacking status by a variety of dubious measures. Just trying to think through your thinking here in a way that is more global.

I like how the structure of keyword and case studies make it possible to read the book in segments that are digestible. And intrigued by the structural implications of the secular blessing in the Onward section, I realize that such a collection of keywords and case studies serves as a secular book of hours to be revisited in any order that may appeal to the reader. The reader benefits from this generous spread of public and personal goods. Appreciate all the thought and labour that went into making it so.

“Anyone can begin”… might want to be explicit again that such beginnings are taken in consort … an opportunity to state that all fruitful beginnings are beginnings with 
Maybe I am being too sensitive to the slippage from “we” to “anyone” — don’t want to loose the image of a collective endeavour

I wonder how the chapter would read if this paragraph associating vulnerability with readiness to engage came before the paragraph about checking ego. Might not have to have the paragraph restating in various ways that vulnerability is not weakness. I just think that there is a strong connection between  checking ego & humility (a connection that that paragraph on weakness gets in the way of). And with para 19 there is a grace note linking checking ego with soul searching that operates via conversation with a critical friend (a form of active receptivity). 
 

Brilliant to place the Together chapter after the Vulnerability chapter.  

This is a lovely way of expressing the role of the leader as guardian of the past and warden of the future. I can picture it as a call out in the design of the book in a lunette of one’s own … 
a leader should be working with others in order to ready them for taking on leadership roles, creating the possibility of a future in which the institution can be better than it is today.
One senses here that the why and the how are coming together. 

Record keeping is where good management serves good leadership. 

Reporting a typo…
[help improve the project or colleagues’ changes of achieving those goals]
read “chances” for “changes”
or is this a coded reference to increasing chances for change ? 🙂
Also an occasion to say I love both your twisty sentences and the short gutsy ones. 
 

I feel a little like I want “We must turn a hard look on our internal engagements” earlier in this graf. I also feel a little like there is a conflating of “communicating with the rest of the world,” even as Brim says “breaking down the borders of the academy/community divide,” and “community engagement.” For some I wonder if the latter is a way to look hard at hierarchies, and means more or at least other than just “communicating with the rest of the world.”

This is not at all a criticism of the writing here about “slowness,” just something this raises for me, and something that probably gets raised elsewhere—and Shawn Graham above brings up something similar—hard to be “the slow professor” when you’re racing up and down 95 to teach at three different schools as an adjunct.

Thinking about two things here:  the first is a question I had reading Generous Thinking:  what happens when you lose faith in your institution? when its commitment to the public good (including its internal public/community) is revealed to be “shallow” (a word you use)?  The second is the most recent “Great Colleges to Work For” survey results—showing a decline in the number of faculty who feel like they do see their institutions recommitting to values.

I don’t see “care” as one of the keywords in the TOC (a structure/pattern I like, by the way)—curious to know how you’re using, what you mean by it (you say duty of care; ethics of care? is this feminist…I have a hard time not hearing much of what you say here and in Generous Thinking with a feminist ear, to use Sara Ahmed’s phrase)

One thing I’m recognizing as I get responses from readers both here and off-line is that my anger may in places be interfering with my capacity for — ahem — generosity toward those positional leaders who have found themselves in impossible circumstances in recent years. I’m willing to embrace that anger but I don’t want it to get in the way of the fullness of my argument, so I’d particularly appreciate notes about the places where I’m painting with too broad a brush, and places where positive examples of folks who’ve been doing it right might be brought to bear.

Ah, this is a good point. It would be good to clarify what I mean by “better” here…

Thanks for this, Shawn! Yes, slowing down is in many ways a luxury, but it can also be a tactic for resistance (I’m thinking about work-to-rule here). And that needs exploration, I think!

Truly. Truly.

This is so hard. And it’s something I want to think about: is rebuilding faith in our institutions dependent on a real transformation in their leadership?

Thanks for this, Martin. As you note in several places, the US-centeredness of my academic experience really shows. I want to do some work to try to open these terms (and others) up, so that folks working in other context can still seen themselves represented.

Oooh, good question. I need to think about this one.

Really good point, and very much in keeping with the argument I made in GT. I’ll take another look at the language throughout.

This is a great point. One limitation of CommentPress is that I couldn’t add section headings to group chapters — “Leadership” is really Part One of the book, and Part Two is all of the keywords that follow. But even if I had been able to place those markers, making the flow from People to Onward would be a help.

Oh, it was. When 35 miles can take 2.5 hours to drive, it’s farther away from LA than you’d think. And with most of my collaborators centered on the east coast… a world away, indeed.

I’m hoping I did answer this, but the question is one I need to keep an eye on. “Vocational logic” of course takes me back to Fobazi Ettarh. Mission-driven institutions often demand the loyalty of their employees in support of the good that they serve, but they don’t always earn that loyalty. The ability to point out such failures, and to organize for their redress, is key to ensuring that we hold such institutions accountable.

Hmmm… good point, François!

Ooh, thanks for this reference (she finally gets around to saying, later that very same year)!

Ah, undoubtedly. Thanks, Martin.

Absolutely!

Good idea! Thanks, Rebecca.

Institutions in the US have similar relationships with their boards, by and large, though some of those relationships are defined in institutional bylaws (and are thus at least potentially subject to some kinds of revision) while others are defined in actual laws (and thus would require entirely different kinds and degrees of action to change). But having spent the last month-plus in an institution being torn apart by a battle between its board and its chief executive (and apparently within the board as well), I’m inclined to say that we’ve got to find ways to transform those structures to make them more accountable. How, I’m not entirely sure. But I’m sure it needs to be done.

Oh my goodness, yes. 100%.

Ooh, I’m going to need to ponder this some more…

Hmmm. There’s something important in both of your comments, Martin and Shawn, though the “for whom” of our institutions is pretty sticky. On the one hand, we see so many disastrous elements of contemporary culture that operate as if there were no future for us to be obligated to (climate change being the most dire among them). On the other hand, there are also institutions whose focus on the future prevents them from a full reckoning with the damage they’re doing today. And that’s where I’d place many universities: endowed for the future, but operating within the logic of scarcity today, and thus requiring their staffs to sacrifice their own futures (UK university pension schemes?) in service to some greater good that doesn’t include them…

Ugh, yes — so much of this project has threatened to devolve into hollow platitudes, and yet a cursory look at any given day’s news makes clear that these dumb things need to be said. A deeper analysis of the issues that you raise — as well as Martin and Shawn’s “for whom” above — is much needed.

Truly. Truly.

Ah, that’s very helpful!

Yes! Bad markup.

Important! Most important!

Sigh. So, so true.

Yes, yes, yes — and it needs to be spelled out just as you say.

Yeah, the original thought was that this text would be like a reading group guide for institutional transformation… and I’m not sure that’s how it’s borne out. I’m leaning toward excising them from the final version.

Yes, absolutely: it’s only apparently passive, and only appears so to those with our culture’s individualist bent…

Nice!

Yes, that’s it. You have an eagle eye for the missed words that I just glide past!

This is a really good point; I do often conflate these two kinds of leadership in ways that may muddy things. I’m going to need to ponder this in in the revision process!

So. Many. Lessons. This is exactly what I’m hoping to do.

Ha! Indeed.

So completely true. I’ve had so many conversations in which someone has pointed to the resistance of the dean/the provost/whomever to an idea when in fact the current holder of that office isn’t opposed at all. It’s fallout from administration as the “dark side”– none of them are to be trusted.

Ah, good point. Thank you!

I think so — but your question suggests that assessment needs to apply to assessing the work of leaders as well as the work of those of us in the classroom or the lab… which is an interesting idea!

Hmmm, I like that.

Good questions… hmmm.

True. I’ll rethink that phrasing!

Yes, absolutely!

I see what you mean… though I do want to distinguish between transparent communications as an act of inclusion and transparent communications as a means of displacing responsibility. I’ll have to ponder this.

Probably! 🙂

It’s the same assumptions, I think, that lead tech bros to think they can “disrupt” their way into solutions for social and political problems — an entirely neoliberal (not to say American) conviction that success (however momentary) in one area means success everywhere.

Ooh, that’s a really good thing for me to contemplate — thank you for surfacing it!

Provocative but 100% true. The primary freedom provided by tenure is the freedom to say no, which causes lots of less-than-desirable tasks to roll downhill. (See below.)

I’ve been pondering this, and definitely need to think this through. The US system is increasingly characterized by its extremes — the protections of tenure for a shrinking minority, and the gig economy for everyone else. There are a lot of degrees in-between, of course, but they’re far less visible, and those “protections of tenure” are in many places under serious attack. I’d like to know more about the kinds of general job protections that exist in the UK system, and how those operate with the specter of potential redundancy in the air…

Aww, thank you!

Thank you both. The pressures of financial responsibility for others is HUGE and perhaps points to another way that financial sustainability presupposes the social…

I’m definitely working toward a pro-union argument, but one of the things that I want to be sure to emphasize is that the existence of the union isn’t enough. It’s an important start, but there’s organizing that still needs to be done within and sometimes even beyond the union. As my own local context, shared a bit below, goes to show, the effectiveness of unions can be undermined when they’re forced to compete with one another, and with the non-union sectors of campus. And unions need strong leaders, not just among their officers but within their ranks.

Thanks, Katina. I feel much the same way. I’m going to hope that the revision process opens up some of those more lofty thoughts in ways that feel worth sharing!

YES love this quote as a starting point <3

This is spot on.

yes! so glad to see the attention on material conditions and labor practices from page 1.

Oof. Yes.

stylistically — the various iterations of “I know” and “I don’t know” across these two paragraphs feel a bit repetitive; might want to rework

Cohorts of leaders, I like this

maybe ref Rebecca Traister’s Good & Mad

agree that a consideration of unions and collective action will be important and hopefully already figures into the book. You raise the question of agency, but there’s also the question of risk—sometimes the people raising their voices do so at risk of significant personal and professional cost. How can that risk be more evenly distributed so that the cost of taking the lead is not so high?

oh boy, agreed.

yes! love this

I’m returning to this paragraph after reading the first few keywords, because I found myself wondering how you determined their order. A bit more signposting about what’s to come would be useful in this intro.

It feels like the challenge of this section is to find fresh ways of writing about this so that it doesn’t veer into hollow platitudes. You get at this a bit in the next paragraph (“It would be rare to find an org that doesn’t put people first”) but I wonder if there are other ways that you can dig into this—not only the topic, but specifically why it is challenging to write about in a new and meaningful way. Maybe even just a bit more time on the effects of late-stage capitalism and the gig economy on our vocabularies (as you do w/ “human capital” below)…

I am also not wild about these question sections. I wonder if grouping them at the end of the entire book as an appendix might land better?

In some ways it’s a discrepancy, but in other ways there’s a deep alignment between these traits and the ways our current systems value/recognize leadership. People are often rewarded and move up not in spite of ‘bad behavior’ but because of it.

Moving from ‘you’ to ‘us’ also has interesting implications for how you (the author) see yourself relative to what you’re writing. Maybe a connection back to your own role and positionality would be useful here.

All this, yes—and doing it without implying that the power structures are not real. I see a lot of attempted coalition-building that denies the very real power inequities at play.

The other thing on my mind in this section is that in the book you toggle between role-oriented leadership and a softer, influence-oriented leadership. I wonder if you need some different ways to refer to those kinds of leadership. Maybe not? But it does seem to be a challenge of the book—how to talk about leadership in ways that can encompass varying positions and degrees of institutional power. Stepping out of the center implies that one is currently centered—but in some cases, building connections and coalitions may require stepping into the spotlight rather than out of it.

just checking pronouns here (the quote mixes they/she)

Ooh I’m so struck by the word “efficient” and wonder if you could complicate it a bit here. Efficiency in terms of results over time, or measured in dollars, or considered in terms of relationships and dynamics that can’t be quantified…

At the same time I think an uncritical push toward transparency can undermine trust. There’s a balancing act between pulling back the curtain and doing the pedagogical work of scaffolding what is then exposed—explaining what people are seeing, why it matters, etc. A blanket data-dump is the opposite of helpful, which you get at in the Documentation subsection below. I think emphasizing curation/care/pedagogy in how info is made available may be useful here.

Ooh, nice framing. The “anxieties and disavowels” seem super important—the feelings that surround evaluation and assessment and agency can be as much a stumbling block as formal structures.

In a moment of distraction, I thought I was still in the assessment section—and I found the idea of deep listening in the context of values/assessment to be fascinating. That’s not what you’re doing here, but now I’m thinking about how much more intertwined some of these sections could be. What if you did focus on listening as part of assessment? What might emerge? This might not be a welcome comment because it doesn’t really fit with the keyword structure, but I do find myself looking for a bit more cross-chapter thinking.

[performing a listening state ]
too real

[To listen politically,” Tsing notes, “is to detect the traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas]
Ooh, love this

[Political listening — deep listening, with the goal of learning —]
Hm, is political listening the same thing as deep listening? Is learning its goal? I’m not sure

[a council of deans, a provost, a university-level diversity and equity officer, and a president]
It’s wild to think of this level as ‘change from below’. I totally get it, coming from CUNY and knowing the many many hierarchical layers that lead up to the board, but you might get some pushback for the framing.

Can you connect this with transparency as discussed in another section? (I forget now which one)

[One of the most transformative, I believe, has to do with budgeting. ]
SO often when people talk about transparency they still won’t share budgets. I think that’s really telling.

[Which processes within your unit generate the greatest suspicion and complaint?]
I like this question a lot

[“agile” has transformed from methodology into ideology as a result]
I’m glad you mention this, because my first reaction on seeing “agile” was a bit knee-jerk. People get really obsessed.

SIGH I wish this didn’t need to be said anymore

Excellent paragraph

So important. Programs continue or shut down based on these metrics and sometimes people are looking at the entirely wrong thing.

I never thought of it in quite this way but it makes perfect sense

Wow—this is pretty transformational.

I’m not sure I agree? I still associate sustainability in an academic context with budgets, not the environment. My first thought is how to articulate fiscal sustainability of a new program to funders.

Ah, maybe my comment above reflects my ‘broader nonprofit’ bias.

Like Martin Paul Eve, I found myself nodding along to this paragraph.

I think an acknowledgement of positionality would not go amiss here.

Yep, this is what I was obliquely referring to in my comment above. White feminism in the academy has some work to do

👏

[insisting that we aren’t labor,]
whew so much you could unpack here

There are also plenty of places that have unionized that nonetheless haven’t done away with the issues you describe (CUNY as just one example)

As someone who spent a lot of time in church growing up, I kind of love this

[I hope that you’ll consider joining the Leading Generously group at HCommons and that you’ll share your favorite resources there.]
I ended my own book with a ‘Ten Ways to Get Started’ section, and I have to say I ended up not loving it. The ideas in your book are big, bold, nuanced. I can’t help but feel that the discussion questions and wrap-up list diminish that a bit. Maybe something to package separately? I don’t know, maybe it’s just my personal preferences coming to bear here, but I feel like I want something a bit different—less practical and more lofty maybe?—as an end note.

I am interested in this argument around “better”… because it’s obviously always a subjective act of judgement embedded in social power relations (as you have written before elsewhere). Who says what constitutes “better”?
Also: slowness does not guarantee better (I know you have put “often”), I’d guess…

Does generosity imply that you must have something to give?

This use of the term “staff” is unfamiliar in a UK context. All employees, including faculty, here, are “staff”.

Just a rhetorical question: why do we believe that universities should be and do better than other institutions or places of work? What kind of vocational logic underpins our desire for institutions of higher education to behave better than society at large? Because in some senses, they already did. My university has protected me, as an extremely clinically vulnerable individual, along with other vulnerable faculty and staff, throughout the pandemic.

Perhaps already answered in the following paragraphs!

This also has potentially cataclysmic burdens of responsibility for the individual involved — feeling singularly responsible for the success or failure of an organisation, when other people’s livelihoods rely upon it carries a huge burden for the person on whom this is all centered. That is, it is also damaging for the person leading, not just for the institution.

A note that, perhaps, may be explored later in the book… What’s the role of unions here? The term “solidarity” drew my attention to these organizations.

I thought the line about the hums prof here was a little overly defensive

The visuality of the metaphor is interesting, also, from a disability perspective…

(and abled-ness, among other axes?)

Another question occurred to me at this point: what is the role of board of trustees/governing body here in the accountability and leadership structure. In the UK context, institutions must do what their governing trustee body says, as part of charity law. The president/vice chancellor is usually directly accountable to that board and bears sole responsibility for institutional fortunes etc.

As before, in the UK context, by law, academic committees/governance structures are not allowed to overrule the Trustee board.

I don’t know if this is a formal requirement of the book, but I was less keen on this “questions for reflection” section — it felt unnecessary after your detailed exposition above.

A question occurred to me in light of this paragraph: what does this mean for the temporality of universities?
What I mean by this is that, recently, at an academic governance meeting that I attended, we talked a great deal about the institution and how it was bigger and longer-lasting than any of the people in the room that day. A 200+ year history, for instance. There was a sense that people in the present might be required to make sacrifices for the sake of that ideal and history.
Is yours an argument against this? If we put people at the centre, rather than more abstract missions, which people are to be served by the institution? The current faculty and students? Future faculty and students? The legacy of past faculty and students?

There’s also the classic economic metaphor here in the UK of the “Investor in People Award”

I very much like this paragraph and its bold statement, as someone whose life is deemed acceptable collateral damage in the UK context.

This perhaps answers some of my earlier questions

Such self-fashioning is also a Foucauldian ethics…

It may be personal preference but, again, I really don’t like this format so much. It does make it feel more like a “textbook of leadership”…

This is a really difficult thing to judge, too.
Sometimes, people do not realise when a critically constructive voice crosses over to become a damaging toxic one. Or different people realise at different stages. It is a risk to make the judgement call on this.

An interesting point: it is difficult to balance this collaboration of power/knowledge with a collaboration of responsibility.
I have worked at institutions where the management were incredibly open about the dire financial straits of the university. It was open, honest, and in some ways refreshing.
But it was also incredibly stressful. Knowing the threat that one’s university is under made it a shared responsibility as well as a shared decision about how we handle it. I could have done without that stress and for it to be someone else’s lookout. Actually, for some faculty, other people being the leadership is a protective move that shields them from feeling in danger.

I note that the “Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure” contain a principle about “Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down”. This is really what this is about, on an individual basis: realising one’s own time-limitedness

This is a great case study/story and I am a huge fan of Chris’s amazing work.
I suppose one question I had, though, was to hark back to your initial comments on “being generous in difficult times”. Obviously, MIT Libraries are well positioned to lead and give much, as they have a $27.4 billion endowment. 
What can those of us whose institutions have barely enough to survive two years into the future do? Such a transformation here would kill us. Yet to say that we can’t lead because we have no cushion against risk feels counter to the collaborative spirit of leadership that this book is proposing.

I’ve also seen environments where people didn’t recognise that they were being trusted, because they had become so inculcated in a collective culture of mistrust. That is: people sometimes don’t recognise good leadership that is trusting because they have been so inculcated to distrust all leadership, as a very concept.

Is there more to be said and cited about the historical interconnections and play-offs between sincerity and authenticity here?

Just to note of this, again, though: this can ALSO create a sense of mass anxiety among people who work for the university. Actually, you know, if there was a leadership cadre who were responsible for this so that I *needn’t be*, I would welcome that as a leadership shield!

Again, just to note that we have become so used to demonisation of “institutional leadership” that I worry it has become impossible, under such collective rubric, often to recognise when leadership does behave well (or, at least, “better”.)

(Not to say that this mass demonization isn’t merited!)

If we are supposed to work on ourselves, as part of leadership, and accountability is part of that leadership, then does assessment necessarily follow from that?

Just to echo that this translation into action is so important. Listening is great, but I’ve also seen endless interminable recursive loops of committees. There was genuine listening, but never any synthesis and action.

I think that transparency CAN, unfortunately, work in entirely this way — as per my previous comments on the collective feeling burdened with the knowledge/responsibility that comes with these data.

Should this section say something about how ideas of transparency accord with or against neoliberalism as an epistemic context for the contemporary university?

A question: why is there the assumption, in this adoption of Agile, that the mechanisms for building software can and should apply beyond that space?(I’m not saying that you are saying that they can and should — but that seems to be the widespread sociocultural assumption.)
But perhaps teaching and educating and researching is not like building software…

As a former national-level competition climber, I approve of this metaphor!
But this is also an intense cognitive process that relies on as much foresight as possible. Skilled climbers will observe, from below, a path and understand how their bodies must move to counter the various forces of gravity in relation to our positions (the “beta” of a route). But not all climbing takes such an approach. Bouldering problems can take months to complete a route of several moves, because no matter how much reading of a route you do, you still must train your body to be able to follow the path.

One of the interesting things that always strikes me in these conversations about agile/nimble is around scale.
Small institutions often have the ABILITY if they so wanted, to bypass processes that could make them much more reactive.
However, there are problems — usually around equity and equality and accessibility and inclusion — with the arbitrary circumvention of process.
I would like to see something about how process and nimbleness interact — and how you take advantage of flexibility, without introducing gross unfairness through not having processes that are open and fair to all.

Does tenure act against this? (i.e. gives people the freedom to decide not to be nimble and to move their teaching to new areas?)
A provocative statement, I know…

Ah. See previous comment!

Again, just to introduce a question about the US-centricity of the comments here. In the UK (and elsewhere) we do not have “tenure” – although job protections are stronger than the US’s general employment conditions – for many academic faculty. What does “tenure” mean around all this vs., say, UK conditions, where faculty can find themselves made redundant. (This can also happen with tenured US faculty, I know.) I just wonder if you might be able to introduce some international dimension here?

I really like this.
Stability might mean: solidity of employment, but flexibility of role.

Worth saying something about how demands for quantitative metrics are always, themselves, embedded in narrative? E.g. using “impact factor” — well, what about all the ways in which this is constructed as a supposedly neutral evaluation, when really is locked in with discourses of quantification at the journal level etc.

Yes! See previous statement on process vs. nimbleness.

Fiction as synonym for “lie”…

I really appreciate this section.
I would say that the core problem I have faced in leadership situations, though, is being financially responsible for other people’s livelihoods. Balanced on a financial knife-edge because we can’t rake in massive profits, the stress and strain of leadership has come because I feel that I am responsible for other people’s ongoing financial wellbeing. Hence, the financial crosses over into the social.

Again: I would be interested to see something about the role of Unions here, the bastions of “solidarity” (but that have also had troubled fortunes in the UK context of HE recently).

Ouch, but probably: yes

OK, so here it is!

Again, there’s a US-centricity to this that doesn’t reflect my experience, in UK HE. Might be worth specifying somewhere more thoroughly the US-based nature of the book. (With apologies if I already missed this.)

[public-facing missions]
Are there private-facing missions? I think I know what you’re getting at here, that there should be alignment between what colleges and universities say they believe and the way their employees and students experience the institution. But maybe that needs to be unpacked a little bit more in this first paragraph?

[AAUP]
Spell out in first use.

[That]
The use of “that” here threw me off. Perhaps “Such culture change”?

[in fact]
I’d cut this, as it undercuts the powerful assertion of the rest of the sentence.

[Associate Vice-President for Shared Sacrifice]
Nice! 🙂

[The only way to prevent such sacrifice from rolling downhill is to build structures to channel it otherwise. ]
I’m not sure about the metaphor here. I’m now imagining a rock rolling downhill but on some kind of track, which I can’t think is what you had in mind.

[The reasons for that state were painfully clear: they have an activist politician-turned-president who has been bent on transforming the institution into a fully corporate enterprise and on undermining everything that ties the institution to the liberal arts, to critical thinking, to public service, to community. ]
If you’re talking here about Purdue, As of the end of this year Daniels will no longer president, of course. But I don’t think the way the new president was selected did anything to help alleviate the poor morale: https://indianapublicmedia.org/news/as-purdue-president-announces-replacement,-some-faculty-question-secretive-selection-process.php

[with our communities that invite them into the work we’re doing, that share it with them, and that make that work into a form of collective action.]
I was thinking this before in paragraph 2, where you talk about “building bridges between the academy and the communities we serve,” where that phrasing nagged me a bit, but not enough to mention it. But now I think I need to point out that both in that sentence and in this one, the “collective action” seems more unidirectional than bi- or multidirectional, that these communities outside the academy are not being positioned as partners in this action, but rather as the recipients of institutional largesse, where they are “served” by being “invited into the work” that is “shared … with them,” rather than our learning from them, our being collaborators (i.e., those who labor together) with them, and their sharing their work with us in ways that then become collective action.
I’m sure that unidirectional language is not your intent, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my public humanities conversations, it’s that we’ve got a lot to learn from those communities and perhaps much less to give them than we might like to think. As our new CEO at Columbia’s medical center, Katrina Armstrong, likes to say, we need to engage the communities around us with humility, rather than superiority. (Very hard for doctors to do, she is also wont to say!)
Just thought it worth mentioning this as you consider how you might want to position generous leadership when it comes to that publicly engaged work that suddenly is on everyone’s lips within the academy.

[and it’s true of our institutions of higher education, too many of which throughout the COVID-19 pandemic have given every impression of placing institutional survival above the lives of those who work and learn on their campuses.]
Amen.

[and our cities]
And towns? I know you just talked about cities above, but I’d like everyone no matter where they live or what size college/university they work in to be able to see themselves in every sentence.

[enormous damage that’s been done — slowly over a period of decades, and then with increasing speed in recent years ]
Has this damage been slow in the past? This language of “repairing” also seems to imply that there was once a structure that was sound and solid — and certainly for many of us who are white middle-class educated people, it did seem that way — but I think it’s important, as we see some of those in power hellbent to rip away anything that threatens to undermine straight cis white supremacy by proclaiming, for example, that “Florida is the state where ‘woke’ goes to die” — that we acknowledge that our colleges and institutions were founded on the notion of the superiority of straightness, gender conformity, and whiteness. What, then, is to be “repaired” exactly? Perhaps a better question might be what can be salvaged from the wreckage that is worth saving?
I suspect that’s where you’re going with the book, but just wanted to raise those issues here. For all the talk and some weak attempts at reparations, there is not to my knowledge one college or university willing to give back the land on which they stand, for example. Giving free tuition to Black students whose parents were slaves who accompanied their masters to university or who built the buildings in which those masters studied and to Indigenous students whose tribes were displaced by colonialism is a step in the right direction, but what happens once they enter into this system that, while in some ways built by them, was never built for them. How to grapple with injustice of all kinds is undoubtedly at the heart of this book, but we do need to ask whether the work isn’t more like gut renovation than repair.

[This skew in the set is due both to the fact that the library has been a key locus of institutional change in recent years]
Interesting you say this. Tbh, this has not often my experience, even within libraries with innovative and creative leadership. But perhaps your interviewees are among those who are enacting such change within their libraries. If so, that might skew your set even further! Not that that’s a bad thing. Just worth pointing out, I think.

[isolated]
Interesting word to describe a college only 35 miles from downtown LA, but I’ll take your word for it that it was a world away!

[seeing their desperation to have a “normal” fall semester, as if hospitals nationwide weren’t struggling to cope with their COVID-19 caseload.]
And as if students, faculty, and staff were not also coming down ill, losing family and friends to death and disability, and even (in many cases) suffering (and continuing to suffer) from long COVID, with its brain fog, exhaustion, and systemic dysfunction that in some cases has lasted for more than 2 years now.
Accommodation for students is the law, but accommodation for those faculty who were or have become immunocompromised or newly disabled have been practically nonexistent.
Even worse is the push for a return to “normalcy” that forbids collective mourning of the huge loss of life — more people died in the United States in the last 2.5 years from COVID than did servicemen/women in all the wars fought since 1775 (excluding the Civil War, but we’ll soon be able to add that number in too). This piece in The Atlantic is excellent on that: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/04/us-1-million-covid-death-rate-grief/629537/

[as singularly]
“as a singularly”?

[just let them do their thing]
And leave well enough alone!

[they got the jobs because they are, or appear to be, leaders; it’s not the jobs that make them leaders.]
Excellent point.

[it is the seat of wisdom]
The seat of wisdom or the seat of power? I don’t think most of the people at the top of the org chart have particular wisdom, but they do have extraordinary power.
Take your “return to normal” example of campus openings, for example, which is now just the norm as we enter into the new academic year. If an instructor feels unsafe or is unwilling or perhaps even unable to go full-time into the classroom — even if the students aren’t required to do the same (hybrid classes are now the norm, requiring even more work for the instructor than online or in-person only) — they are told they have no choice. My partner describes this a “Starbucks mentality,” that instructors, like baristas, are interchangeable.
Surely a wise leader would recognize this is not how to treat people who you claim are so valuable organizationally that both the institution and broader society would not exist without you. But there are very few wise leaders. Instead, they are obeyed because they are able to fire anyone who bucks them. That is power, plain and simple. And is used every single day by those who wield it.

I like this thought experiment, but of course not even a president is at the top of the org chart. What of boards of trustees? They actually function a bit like this — as collective decision makers who supposedly are also collectively accountable. But that structure doesn’t seem to be an agent of change in any way. I’ll grant you that’s because they often simply act as rubber stamps for the president, but surely they could act otherwise, if they wished.
But they don’t wish. I don’t have an answer for why that may be, but I think it’s worth grappling with all the same.

[on the gender, race, or institution of the author]
Or knowledge (and opinion) of the individual themselves.

[implemented by individuals]
It is interesting for me to note within this context how much of a better experience it is when those individuals know who each other are and can collectively work together to improve the product — like you are doing here. But then the goal needs to be consciously and intentionally different — to use Beronda’s phrase, the work becomes “groundskeeping rather than gatekeeping.”
I wrote a little something about that once: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/leap.1001

[changing the criteria for promotion and tenure such that they surface and embrace their subjectivity, treating each case on its own terms rather than assuming an unearned neutrality]
I’m thinking here of how this dovetails with your observations above about merit. In fact, much of the weight of P&T decisions rests on the letters provided by outside reviewers, who are supposed to position this individual — it is the one instance in which each case *is* treated individually — within the context of the larger discipline/disciplines. The reviewers are, in fact, instructed to be subjective as to the merit not only of the work that has been produced but of that individual’s perceived impact on the field. As in peer review, the reviewers often remain anonymous — and certainly their letters remain confidential, at least where the candidate is concerned — but they of course obviously know the person they are writing about. That’s the whole point! But often these individuals are given little to no guidance as to how to approach the task they’ve been given, and they may have uneven experiences of the person — mentee, colleague, friend, someone who’s merely heard of the person but is considered, ahem, a leader in the field, and so on.
The personal is political, as the second-wavers used to say, but here I mean by the phrase the requirement, especially when professors consider going up for full, that you’ve been seen and heard and are well liked. The “old boys club” may have become just “the club,” but being considered “a valuable member of the club” is crucial to success in the academy.

[most effective politics is often conducted at the grassroots level, through real engagement with people and their needs and fears in the day to day. ]
And also where hierarchies are often intentionally flat — or even nonexistent.
I think what makes academia unique, which you haven’t (yet?) addressed, is the fiction that “the faculty” operates in exactly this grassroots way, with decisions made at the department level (hopefully by consensus, although we all know dictatorial chairs exist) that somehow find their way up and are (perhaps) embraced by faculty senates, deans, even provosts and presidents. The rotating chair, deans and provosts drawn from the professorate (who may someday return to it) — these are all supposed to reinforce the grassroots nature of academic decision-making, “real engagement with people … in the day to day,” as you put it.
The tension between that cherished idea and the reality is where the politics really lies, I think — and the true challenge for leaders in the academy at every level.
“Between the idea / And the reality / …  Between the conception / And the creation / Between the emotion / And the response / Falls the Shadow / Life is very long.”

[over the couple]
“the last couple”

[Or, I should say, the president’s vision and authority remain exclusive to an extent: the president is hired by and responsible to the board, and as the board’s sole employee the full weight of that governing body’s pleasure or displeasure rests on the president’s shoulders. There’s another book to be written about remediating the toxic relationships between institutions and their boards, but it’s not one I feel equipped to write. At least not today.]
Ah, so you did discuss boards after all. I’m sure you’re right, but I also think this might be worth putting a bit of this footnote in the main text, even if you’re going to punt the further conversation, as you are wise to do.

Ah! I see FN 15 in the paragraph above talks about boards! I’m suggesting you pull a bit of that footnote into the text so that others don’t think what I — and you, obviously! — did at this juncture and wonder why you don’t mention them.

[Sarah]
No h in Sara.

While I like this quote a lot, I do think there is an underlying assumption that the educational enterprise in and of itself does have intrinsic value, that education, even if it’s run like a business and is (as you point out in Generous Thinking) no longer a common good, is still somehow in and of itself valuable. This core belief is why universities can ask for — and be given — such sacrifice from their employees, who, while not properly rewarded for the service and teaching that are key to education, still consider their work to be a vocation. Like the monasteries of old, universities are comprised of communities dedicated to a common calling. That “calling” is still core to the concept. The loyalty is not to the university but to the profession. And that loyalty can be exploited — and is. This is different from other companies, where the loyalty may be to the company — or not — but is rarely to the work itself.
That doesn’t take away the important point that people are key. But I also think there’s a much greater challenge (and even resistance) to change because of how academics think of themselves and how academia itself works.

[People are not adjectives in the service of capital. ]
Nice!

[contribute to the institution]
I think what’s key here is that the people who work for universities often do not think they are contributing to the institution, but rather to the people within those walls: to their students, to their colleagues. This is a stark difference from companies (even non-profit ones) who focus on products and whose employees know they work in service to those aims and, yes, to contribute to the bottom line. 

[Lingering behind that determination is, of course, the idea that if we don’t deliver that product, our customers will go elsewhere, and the university will not survive.]
I’m sure you agree, though, that it’s much more complicated. Even those instructors who have had good reason to request to continue online but who are pedagogues to the core will admit that the classroom experience is superior, both for the students and for the teacher. But when mask mandates become optional and student don’t show up in person because they are sick or because they are exhausted and overwhelmed, but they want to attend virtually, that classroom experience becomes both personally scary and pedagogically fragmented. Universities can charge full tuition, yes, but students are not getting the full “college experience,” either inside or outside the classroom. And with millions of students, who thought they were less likely to be seriously affected by COVID, now experiencing long COVID, increasingly it is not that students will go elsewhere, but that they will drop out of college altogether. Encouraging “back to normal” behavior is more likely in the long run to affect the financial health of universities than would be policies that clearly looked to keep students, faculty, and staff healthy, such as required vaccinations and ongoing mask mandates.

Agree on the need to address vocational awe. Although that’s often positioned as a librarian thing, as one of my previous comments noted, it is a much broader issue in the academy, where these ideas of having a “calling” and treasuring this particular “vocation” are very powerful.

[(There’s another book to be written on this particular problem: the long-term ramifications of the neoliberal turn away from public investment in higher education and toward a market-oriented model of financing and a corporate-derived board structure has submerged our campuses in the death cult of late capitalism. But I digress.) ]
Important digression, though. It’s what you need to do with that first mention of boards of trustees in the last chapter, put it into the text, even if just parenthetically.)

[The relationship between institutions and those people is the entirety of the institution’s value, and if the lives of those people do not come first, the institution’s survival is moot.]
Key passage.

[not just the hours they spend on our campuses or in our offices]
Or in their home offices or in the evenings and on weekends.
My partner, who is a tenured professor at an Ivy League university who has been struggling for years with long COVID (ironically, probably contracted in February 2020 at an academic conference), has in these last two years really become aware of the ableism embedded in the academy. An interesting and often-fraught discussion he has started to have with academic friends and colleagues has been to point out that most professors (in the United States, anyway) are on a 9-month contract, but often work 12 months and often do 50-60 hours of work all year round. The argument my partner is trying to advance is that academics are being paid to do 35 hour workweeks for 9 months and that doing more makes those who cannot (or will not) because of disability or — as you point out here — individual, family, or community priorities be viewed as “less productive,” even if they are being fully productive during the time for which they are being paid.
My partner receives considerable pushback on this observation from academics who pride themselves on their “productivity” by working those extra hours and extra months, but this is truly a question of equity, and this inequity has started to become the expectation: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/overworked-academics-give-away-one-third-their-time. It will only get worse, as we struggle with long-term effects of a pandemic we are still nowhere close to ending. Endemic COVID in an environment that requires constant thinking and the sheer physical exertion of teaching is likely to affect universities much more gravely than they wish to acknowledge, especially if there is no recovery time, such summers would provide.
I point to the airline industry as instructive. The dropping of mask mandates has resulted in flight delays caused by crew illnesses — over and over again. Pilots in particular can’t simply be replaced, as their skill set is specialized and the hiring pool limited. Instead flights are now being regularly cancelled and airlines are losing money. Imagine this scenario in the academy as it also plays out over years. It’s not a positive trajectory.

[“anarcho-capitalism.”]
It would be helpful to define this term in just a few words here, e.g., “the principle that all workers should participate in the capitalist enterprise voluntarily, both individually and collectively, without coercion.”

[the most takeaway]
???

[leader in question is getting things done]
Is it truly the leader getting things done? Or merely taking credit for the work others are doing, as you already say? It might be good to unpack in a sentence or so why such people are considered leaders. Tyrants are, of course, a type of leader in an absolute sovereign kind of way — but are such people praised?

[you can’t really be up to the task of making a better workplace, much less a better world.]
Is this truly the underlying goal of such leaders, though? Might they not instead be aiming for, say, maximum efficiency and productivity? And doesn’t that often align with institutional goals as well, those of “impact” and “excellence,” for example?
 
We like to think of values as inherently positive, but there are plenty of negative values — competition, for example, as you discuss in Generous Thinking — that are not only encouraged but rewarded. Within that world, such bad bosses thrive because, as you say, they are seen to be squeezing blood from a turnip and are applauded for it, even though the blood comes from their people rather than some root vegetable.

[to really consider ]
This is the first step, the recognition of the work that needs to be done. The second step, which I don’t see in here, is then acting differently. I know plenty of people who say, in essence, “Sure, I make mistakes. Who doesn’t?” and then just go on unchanged. Recognizing your shortcomings is meaningless without addressing them and changing yourself. It would be good to be explicit here about the difficulty of bridging the gap between thinking and doing.

[Deans, it might be noted, seem to do a lot of this.]
Not surprisingly. It’s common in middle management — and deans are the ultimate middle managers.

[it’s]
Here do you mean the criticism?

[It’s]
And here do you mean the mantra “It’s not about you”? Or also the criticism?

[it]
The message? Or … ?

As my comments above indicate, the antecedent of “it” throughout this paragraph is often unclear, although “it’s not about you” seems clear enough.

[when you genuinely ask]
Ask what? Or ask generally? I’m sure in the context of the quotation, this phrasing makes sense, but it’s a little odd here.

Reading this more carefully, I see it’s “asking deep questions.” You might recast the sentence to read, “As they note, “when you genuinely ask [deep questions], you …”

[Without that willingness to be vulnerable]
You began the paragraph by “checking your ego” and end by “willingness to be vulnerable” — are those two the same in your thinking here? Or is the second dependent on the first?

[passivity]
I understand what you mean, that you are not interrupting or thinking about your own argument rather than being attentive to the other person, but is deep listening passive? I’d think instead it’s very active, as in “active listening.”

[vulnerability does not mean weakness]
This is an important distinction.

[impossible]
Impossible for what?

[removing the armor]
Shedding the skin, as it were?

[built]
Building?

Having built?

[they are]
There are?

This is a particularly nice phrase within the overall context of this book.

[, however, ]
I’d strike this “however.” What you’re saying in this sentence is in support, not in contrast, with the last sentence.

And, crucially, your willingness to be vulnerable!

[“people like me,”]
I’m reminded of an observation made by a member of my team at CDRS, as we were hiring several new employees, that we tended deliberately to hire people “not like us,” who then also became part of us, thus making us even stronger as a team.
 
This intentional troubling of “us-ness” is, of course, core to the idea that diverse teams are the best teams. This classic article (“What Differences Make a Difference? The Promise and Reality of Diverse Teams in Organizations”) from 2005 by Mannix and Neale has been cited more than 2000 times for a reason: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26158478/. I think it will resonate with you as well.

Part one of what?

[as you climb the org chart.]
Kinda nice piece on this, which flips the chart on its head in talking about servant leadership: https://mcaiazza.medium.com/so-you-want-to-climb-the-org-chart-ffb1e9bb02d9

[“showing people what’s in it for them,” enabling them to understand themselves as having the potential for real influence, now and in the future]
I’m wondering what lessons/strategies from community organizing might be useful to consider here and throughout this chapter.

[this]
What does the “this” refer to?

[the exercise ]
The exercise of strategic planning? Or something else?

[collective process such as this]
Again, I am unsure what the “this” refers to …

[brings]
Brought?

Is it worth mentioning that neither Greg nor Ellen are still at MIT, but instead have moved on to other leadership roles that required they step into very big shoes, Greg at CRL, replacing the legendary Bernard Reilly, and Ellen at CDL, replacing the equally legendary Ivy Anderson? In both cases, what they learned about coalition building during the MIT reorg is now core to their success in their (comparatively) new roles, which are multi-institutional organizations in which all members have equal voice.

[This and all quotations that follow in this case study derive from Eow]
Is there a reason you did not get Ellen’s perspective? This case study seems oddly one-sided in that respect, especially when the whole point is to illustrate coalition building through open communication.

[straight-forward communication]
Your observation above about “back-channeling filled with discontent” is, I think, one of the main reasons distrust can become so entrenched. Back-channeling is the opposite of “straight-forward communication” — but also, oddly, reinforces trust among the individuals that are included within that channel, often over and against those who are not.
 
And (I can say from personal experience) even among those of us who are pretty self-aware and are entirely committed to values of openness and vulnerability, retreating over and over into the comfort of back-channeling, where you feel you will be truly heard, can end up a habit hard to break. And I can guarantee that unless there is a conscientious effort to insist on open communication and to actively discourage the back-channeling, there will likely be many back-channel conversations happening simultaneously, even in a small group, much less in a large organization. The miscommunication and misunderstandings are only exacerbated, the distrust only deepened, the more back-channeling there is.

[necessary elements of building trust]
So is, I think, a shared commitment to that open, honest, and, yes, mutually vulnerable communication you made reference to above. It’s entirely possible for every member of a group to demonstrate “care, sincerity, reliability, and competence” — and for none of those to be in doubt — and yet have some members of that same group inhabit such distrust of other members that they hear, for example, criticisms where none are intended and are eventually unable, without considerable effort and perhaps even outside assistance, to listen to what is actually being said rather than to hear what they believe is being said.
 
That can be a hard cycle to break, although it is possible with renewed, conscious commitment to enacting those shared values — through intentional daily practice — that you discuss in the next paragraph.

Back-channeling by another name! 🙂

[confidence]
Competence? (Although that’s an interesting Freudian slip!)

[principles of restorative justice]
And those of transformative justice, too?

[(Of course, one might inquire here about our attachment to applying quantitative assessment to our students in the form of grades, and whether they similarly run the risk of distracting our students from their real goals, but I digress.)]
In this case, I think that might be worth a comment here, like this one, but also a footnote. The “ungrading movement” (which has been around for quite some time: see https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/11/14/significant-learning-benefits-getting-rid-grades-essay) has been gaining traction (see, e.g., https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2022/04/27/professor-shares-benefits-and-drawbacks-ungrading-opinion), especially in this time of increased student stress.
 
It’s something my partner has been doing for the last few semesters, but was embarrassed to admit to colleagues, fearing it would be frowned on. When he finally did talk to a colleague about taking this approach, he was told, “Oh! I do that too!” I think this approach is much more widespread than many think.
 
And is a much more real-world way to have students approach their work and its evaluation. When they get out into the workforce, their bosses will not grade them every day or even every week. They may get feedback in regular 1v1 meetings — or not. They need to understand for themselves how well they are doing, create their own rubric for success, and be able to chart their progress, so that when their annual review comes around, they can bring that to their boss. It’s where academia meets the real world in very practical ways.

I said ‘amen!’ when I read about moving away from quantified metrics…
re slowing down, perhaps this is dealt with later on (I’ve only started reading) but I am reminded of discussions in the archaeology world about ‘slow archaeology’, and the problem there I have about who that implies. To be slow is a privileged position, right? Who can have the luxury of slowness?  Who is the ‘we’ who can slow down?
(looking forward to reading more; so cool to see you continuing to write and respond in public)

ah, and here is the answer to my question, thank you!

Y’know, the emphasis on love reminds me a bit of Jane Bennett’s 2001 book on ‘Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics’. Enchantment, there, is a mood that inspires an ethics of generosity. Is it possible that leadership (as you conceive it, love, and learning) could lead to enchantment?

Coming at things from the world of simulation and agent based modeling, one can see how individual actions end up creating structures that emerge from those individual actions and then end up constraining individuals to act in particular ways. I think then a focus on individual actions is the only way we can disrupt the machines since the machines emerge from them, but one has to think about how individual actions in particular contexts can give rise to unintended (or intended) consequences.
Not just what you do but where/when you (and how many of you!) do it that can push emergent change/

Which makes me think of network analysis, and Martin’s comment. Maybe we can know how we are connected, and thus who is able to shape things? Alternatively, maybe if we are to practice generous leadership, we need to actively bridging clumps of otherwise disparately connected people, make new shortcuts. Granovetter was pointing to this in the 70s with the Strength of Weak Ties…

Presidential statements also don’t guarantee the practice putting health, safety, and well-being of faculty and staff first.  Combined with cut-backs certain faculty and staff were singled out, cut, or furloughed, some never asked back, creating a multiple class system. Assessment for accountability purposes should follow well-intended statements. Burnout is multifold when feelings of safety and wellbeing aren’t maintained due to the additional daily anxiety and emotional labor, potentially impacting the quality of work and overall student and faculty retention.

I was reading an article on empathy, ethics, and autism that made the distinction between the moral or interactive and practical attitudes.  “In an interesting article on Kant’s view of friendship, Rae Langdon elaborates the distinction between persons and things in a way that nicely points up its limits. Drawing on the work of P. F. Strawson, she contrasts the moral or ‘‘interactive’’ standpoint we commonly assume toward our fellow human beings (especially those close to us) with the more practical or ‘‘objective’’ attitude we take toward things. In the former case, she says, ‘‘we are involved,’’ and this involvement shows up in the way we communicate and cooperate with others. And yet, she adds, ‘‘we don’t adopt the moral standpoint—the interactive standpoint—toward everybody, all the time’’ (Langdon 1992: 487).”  In the practical attitute, people become the problem to be managed. “On the Pragmatics of Empathy in the Neurodiversity Movement” – Paul Antze 2010.

Obama called this “leading from behind.”

I understand why you say “I’ll take up in the chapters ahead”, but you just used it in the last chapter too.  Maybe say – see chapter 3 and 5 – or something more specific so that it is possible to go forward and find it.

This is what the President of the institution in the aforementioned chapter needed.  It isn’t enough to state, you must teach too.  Initiatives often talk about the importance of including professional development as part of the implementation plan, but these then are rarely realized.  Unfunded mandate is one expression – these are perhaps “unled” or “unco-envisioned” mandates?  Those aren’t the right phrases, but it is 4 pm and my brain isn’t working, and I have no community in this room to collaborate with at the moment.

Beautiful – let’s put ZingTrain together with ZenTrain and then we’ll have implementably envisioned economy based on anarcho-mindfulness!

The Golden Rule.

The problem is that behind the closed doors is where there is a presentation without imagination that one needs to choose between the human and the bottom line is a false dichotomy. The leader needs to have the imagination and the courage to work through the presentation of those options and empower others to move towards the communal human solutions. Beware of behind closed doors pressure cooker meetings. There is always another perspective to seek out when there seem to be no options.

[always]
I would say – it is never easy – if really truly done in a perpetually self-reflective way.  An ego can be built on pride in bringing people together, on building coalitions, etc. that can create new blinders that can backfire.  There need to be ego unpacking and reckoning activities.  Maybe – Reckoning with your Ego is never easy.  Sorry to be so focused on realism – maybe into naturalism.  

[but lowering the barriers also creates the possibility of receiving criticism and anger]
Fear is as important as vulnerability – Ok well maybe vulnerability is fear.  Fear of criticism and anger.  If you don’t fear it, it can’t hurt you.Dune – The Litany Against Fear – (don’t know pp.)
“I must not fear.Fear is the mind-killer.Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.I will face my fear.I will permit it to pass over me and through me.And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
And then of course the “I” should go and talk openly about their fears with their community of co-leaders.  

There is a temporal-spatial aspect to this as well that you likely talk about elsewhere.  The linearity of a timeline of planned outcomes that can even be manifested in trying out the ideas of others, as they also have hope for a planned outcome that can preclude the input of others.  It takes real courage, to not jump to planning mode based in known ways of being that imagine preconceived pathways or outcomes, and to sit with a process that is emergent; Particularly academics are expert planners who like to vision and stopping and sitting with the moment to listen and refrain from shifting into planning mode takes practice.  

[when one disagrees with someone]
Disagreement is an opportunity to ask exploratory questions to understand more why someone came to their conclusion.

I think in this section the question of scale needs to be addressed.  It is possible to do this with a class, a center or a department, but how to do you it with a college or a university that is 65,000 people?

[And this in itself is a vulnerable moment, because, as she noted, “you will be accused of everything.]
It is also important that there will always be people who take advantage of a situation.  An argument against not doing something is always – well people will take advantage of this, or there will be some who don’t think this is worth doing.  Well, there will always be people like this who try to take advantage. Is it worth not doing just because of a small minority of people might try that. And can’t we watch out for those people and try to minimize that negative impact, when the overwhelmingly favorable conditions would otherwise be implemented?