Spring New (Planting) Moon
I heard for as long as Kate worked at Allina about corporate culture taking over medicine. The MIA is not alone among museums in taking a “dynamic, new approach”, DNA, which involves wringing more dollars out of the visitor’s “museum experience.” Major league sports underwent their corporate take-overs years ago. When I worked for the church, business oriented members would often explain how it needed to be run more like a business.
A general economic malaise, largely created by two strangely related forces, the anti-tax intransigency of Republicans and the illegal manipulations of debt-related securities, has formed an environment in which non-profit institutions have become starved for cash. Though a non-profit does not, by definition, have making money as its first or even second or third reason for being, all non-profits do have to balance the books somehow.
It is this need that makes them vulnerable to the inroads of corporate cultures for which making money is not only the bottom line, it’s the only line. This leads to medical clinics defined as revenue centers, sports departments milked for their ticket income and docent lead tours to become big ticket items for museum special exhibitions.
The need for a non-profit to have enough income to offset expenditures is nothing new. What’s new is those who make this need the primary objective of a medical group, or a university campus* or a museum department. It’s at this point that the health needs of patients or the educational needs of students or museum goers get shoved down the list of reasons for a doctor or a professor or a teacher or a curator or a docent to do what they do.
You could argue, as many urging corporate style make overs of our most important cultural institutions do, that this is merely correcting an aberration, that these kind of institutions should always have had a sharper pencil, more attention to the time honored counting of beans.
It is not. What this emphasis on corporate objectives does is negate, yes, I would go that far, negates, the long held belief in this country that some communal matters are too important to put at risk of creative destruction: education, performing arts, art museums, science museums, medical care and spiritual welfare chief among them.
This prop 13 mentality has successfully challenged much of the fabric of our communal life, turning us toward the libertarian ideal of one for one and all for none. This is individualism and liberty used not as instruments of freedom, but as wrecking balls.
This is not the country in which I want to live, nor is it the country in which I want my children or grand-children to live. My oldest son and his wife are teachers. My wife is a physician. My youngest son is a captain in the Air Force. All of them dedicated to the welfare of the communal whole. All of them putting their own time and chance of capitalist success aside for a purpose, a reason for being that has nothing to do with the profitability of the school, the clinic or the military.
You could argue, I suppose, that what I’m saying here is special pleading and I would agree. It’s a special pleading on the part of those who believe communal needs come before private ones. I am one such person.
* The University Will Not Be Sold (Chronicle of Higher Education for April 9, 2013)
“Public universities are not corporations. They are not sports franchises.
…The corporate vision of Rutgers’s president, Robert L. Barchi, and his associates centralizes sports branding as an income-generating strategy, clearly at the expense of our student athletes and potentially at the expense of academic excellence…
His administration’s embrace of a corporate vision has led President Barchi to behave like a corporate raider against his own university: He has treated Newark’s campus like a thriving company subjected to a hostile corporate takeover. His administration attempted to underfinance Newark and milk its profits (tuition). Next it plans to strip it of its assets (most-profitable graduate programs). We know how these hostile takeovers usually end—the raided “company” ends up on the junk heap.”
