In the recently published Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University, Kathleen Fitzpatrick ruminates on the current state academia, with a focus on dominant trends toward competition and individualism and weakening public support. “The university has been undermined,” she writes, “by the withdrawal of public support for its functions, but that public support has been undermined by the university’s own betrayals of the public trust” (xi). She argues that a substantial shift in academia is required in order to reinstate public trust, and to build relationships with the larger communities that universities are apart of. For Fitzpatrick, this requires an embrace of listening over telling, of care over competition, and of working with the public rather than isolation and insulation–in short, it requires the generous thinking, and actions, of the book’s title.

Notably, Fitzpatrick argues that open access has a significant role to play in such an endeavour:

Enabling access to scholarly work does not just serve the goal of undoing its commercialization or removing it from a market-driven, competition-based economy, but rather is a first step in facilitating public engagement with the knowledge that universities produce. (148)

For Fitzpatrick, making scholarship available is a foundational step in collaborating with others, in line with the community engagement she advocates for throughout the book.

Work cited

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2019. Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP.