In the long term, the organizations may become better versions of themselves while finally living the values they’ve long fought for. In the short term, the battles between staff and organizational leadership have effectively sidelined major progressive institutions at a critical moment in U.S. and world history. “We used to want to make the world a better place,” said one leader of a progressive organization. “Now we just make our organizations more miserable to work at.”
Later,
Executive directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?’” said one, echoing a refrain heard repeatedly during interviews for this story.
If you have not read the widely-cited article already, go read the whole thing. It sounds to me as thought the intersection between Woke culture and non-profit culture is quite combustible. The article reinforces my view that lack of accountability to customers makes organizations ripe for dysfunction.
It occurs to me that the culture shift may be going in reverse. In forward gear, the crybully culture went from elite universities to lesser universities to K-12 education to journalism to the Democratic Party to non-profits and finally to the corporate sector. In reverse gear, it may go on the opposite direction. First, corporations may decide that they do not need to be intimidated by their woke employees. Next will come non-profits. Then the Democratic Party. Then major media firms. Then K-12 principals. Then lesser universities. The last institutions to realize that they should set expectations for grown-up behavior will be the universities where the Woke movement first took hold.
In other words, the backlash against the Woke crybullies will be last in, first out. The last institutions to subject itself to the Woke yoke will be the first to throw it off.
When growing numbers of people are scrambling to put food on the table and gas in their tanks, anyone who believes pronouns are a life and death issue will be shunted to the side. Here's hoping the fever breaks quickly.
As is becoming increasingly the case, Arnold's ordering is bizarre because of his dislike of k-12 education. K-12 schools aren't woke as a rule, they aren't dominated by woke employees and oh, by the way, principals are utterly irrelevant to what and how school policies are set.
If anyone reading this is about to say "but unions" in rebuttal, you, too, are the problem. Whatever you don't like about schools *outside* of a generalized loathing of unionized employees--it ain't unions.
Nothing wrong with the post itself, but since K-12 schools are currently far less in thrall to wokedom than corporations, for example, I don't suppose things will happen as he expects. For example, k-12 schools can't use AA in hiring teachers, while corporations *must* use AA for hiring everywhere.