You can’t save an institution by betraying its mission
Supporters will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no supporters.
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me in SAN DIEGO on Mar 24 at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour stops here.
Paula Le Dieu is one of the smartest, most committed archivists I know. Many years ago, she shared a neat analogy with me about the paywalling of public archives, a phenomenon that has become rampant as public institutions have been pushed to seek private funding to close the gaps left by swingeing cuts.
Closing up these archives in order to give these new “investors” a chance to make their money back is pitched as just “good business.” But — as Paula pointed out — this isn’t how business works at all! If you are an early-stage investor to a startup, providing patient capital in its early stages, then later investors don’t get to zero out your shares. If a museum or public broadcaster is a business, then the public is the early investor, and their share is access. Taking away free access is tantamount to wiping out our investment.
But of course, public institutions aren’t businesses, and they don’t exist to make profits. They exist to serve the public interest. If your public health system, public education system, public archives, public museum or public parks are making a profit, then something is desperately wrong.
Managers of these public institutions forget this lesson at their peril. Every public institution eventually faces an existential funding crisis, and when that crisis strikes, the only thing that will save you is public support. Back in 2014, I got to speak to a group of curators about this when I keynoted the Museums and the Web conference in Florence:
https://mwf2014.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/glam-and-the-free-world/index.html
Since then, I’ve had many chances to talk with Paula about her views on archiving in these apocalyptic times. She’s come up with a crisp formulation of the point I tried to make in that speech — when archives trade access off for preservation, they sign their own death warrants. As I said in my speech, if you don’t maximize public access to your archive, then there will come a day when they take away your funding and the public won’t care because you locked them out of their own collection. When that happens, all your careful preservation work will be used to prepare the auction catalog for the sale of your collection to the “philanthropic” billionaires who insisted that you lock up the collection in the first place. Your meticulous documentation will become the manifest for a shipping container full of formerly public treasures that will henceforth reside in a lightless, climate-controlled warehouse in the Geneva Freeport.
My conversations with Paula came back to me this weekend when I listened to Corey Rubin talking with Brooke Gladstone on NPR’s On the Media, about the universities that are seeking to avert Trump’s attacks by sacrificing students and faculty who spoke out against Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestine:
From Columbia’s complicity in the kidnapping of green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, a grad student now held in immigration detention in Louisiana; to Yale professor Helyeh Doutaghi, suspended because an AI-driven pro-Israel site hallucinated a connection between her and Hamas:
https://coreyrobin.com/2025/03/15/mccarthyism-at-yale-then-and-now/
These institutions — and others, like the LA Children’s Hospital, which halted gender-affirming care for trans kids — aren’t merely “complying in advance.” They are betraying their mission in order to save their bacon:
This will come back to bite them in the ass. This is like firefighters doing a bit of arson on the side to make ends meet, and thinking that the townsfolk will continue to vote to maintain their budget.
I get it: it’s damned easy to convince yourself that you need to destroy the village to save it. By “living to fight another day,” you will get more chances to serve the public. Rationalization is a hell of a drug:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Trump and his fascist movement wont’t let up on their assault against institutions that support free inquiry, care, justice and openness. Rolling over for them now will not keep you safe tomorrow. But with every betrayal, these institutions alienate more and more of the public, without whose support they are ultimately doomed. Supporters will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no supporters.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it
Image:
Ajay Suresh
https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajay_suresh/52009406881/
