The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

Michigan State University

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Back in December, my university's top administrators announced an official position of "thoughtful restraint," attempting to stake out a commitment to institutional neutrality on contentious political issues by not making statements or taking sides.

Independence and Neutrality

I am delighted this morning to share the news that

 Leading Generously

is now available as an audiobook,

 [1]

in addition to its print and e-book formats! The audiobook is narrated by the amazing Kristin Aikin Salada, who has posted a more enticing excerpt on her LinkedIn announcement than the opening pages that Audible shares.

 [2]

If you listen to the audiobook, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Leading Generously, the Audiobook!

I'm back to my all-too-slow reading of Oliver Burkeman's

 Four Thousand Weeks

, and am finding myself a bit haunted this morning by this passage: Haunted, because I

 at least in theory

started a vacation yesterday -- or, rather, two days of vacation followed by my university's relatively new December 24 to January 1 closure. But I'm having a super hard time actually turning work off.

Rest

I'm finally getting a chance to do some sustained reading, now that my winter break has begun, and so managed at last to dive into Maxwell Neely-Cohen's "Century-Scale Storage". It's good to see foregrounded the idea that preservation is not a matter of technological development (quite the contrary) but of human care buttressed by financial investment.

Preservation and Care

This site is running in 11ty and is built locally, after which the live site (which gets built into the _site folder) is pushed to my Reclaim Hosting account, where it's served up as kfitz.info. As an intermediate step, I have been pushing the code and content that builds the site to a GitHub repository, and then the _site folder to another GitHub repository, kfitz-site, mostly for preservation/backup purposes;

Gitea

Equality and Justice

Crossposted from the Knowledge Commons team blog.

Over the last several weeks, we've seen colleagues of ours across the country posting about the direct impacts they're experiencing of the current attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities, including sudden and extensive terminations of previously awarded grants.

On the NEH and Our Path Forward

Here I was, super happy with my return to blogging in 2024. I wasn't crazy prolific or anything, but I did manage to post

 something

every month except for April. What happened in April? Kind of a lot. But nothing compared with January. Someday I hope to have the time and space necessary to write about at least part of it, but that day is not today.

Holding Space

It happened this weekend. In the aftermath of turning in the final manuscript for

 Leading Generously

, I promised myself that I would not start working on a new writing project until I had some idea that absolutely would not leave me alone, that I'd instead spend at least a year reading as omnivorously as I could through the ideas of others and see whether anything worth saying surfaced.