I should leaf through my copy of DiAngelo to see what notes I made in it but I just need to give more context than this article can give, as good as it is addressing these issues, just because you all weren't around when this stuff started. I recall my professors in a counselor education program trying to find their footing in the early 70s in the face of things coming apart, especially around race. Bill said he thought since he was Canadian it didn't affect him until he realized he was living in it. The few minorities in this program of 60 grad students had to shoulder all the weight of educating White folk; that fell on me, too, since I was married to a Black woman. Sadly, two of the Blacks in the upper reaches of the grad program were total jerks who milked the admins for money with 'burn the mother down' threats and harassed my wife for being married to me. Through it all those profs had to deal with angry minorities, hurt White people (2 dropped out after a blue eyes/brown eyes demo with us as the kids - I got to sit up front b/c I'm brunette and blonds got pushed to the back-the explosion came when brunette friends walked over people they had gone on break with every day to mingle with other 'dark people' - it was very effective but emotionally devastating for some people).
Anyway, while I have enountered really nutty people doing what used to be called multicultural training until teachers got tired of Blacks and Browns and wanted to deal with White kids in wheel chairs and all the multiculturalism went to hell, we've never come back (I retired 10 years ago from teaching) but I hope with all the Okuns and DiAngelos going over the top you can see what they and many of us saw: that the bulk of White people were still wrapped up in the original Identity and don't want to let go and it's brought us Trump.
Having worked internationally a lot, it's especially hilarious to me that the emphasis on measurable hard outcomes and empiricism/objectivity is coded as "white" here and the mushy empathetic process/democratic/collaborative stuff is coded as "nonwhite"; as somewhat alluded to Mat's footnote there are many nonwhite cultures which go even harder on the metrics, testing, and rigor than Western culture. In fact I would say that in most non-western working cultures, it's actually completely inverted from Okun's framing - I've encountered a much stronger emphasis on authority, measurable outcomes, and the bottom line in Asian, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European work cultures and companies there often specific train their managers to adopt more collaborative and inclusive management styles when collaborating with Western/white colleagues.
My guess is it kind of just comes down to survive vs thrive strategies and how much slack an economy generally has (and to be clear, I agree with Thiel it's probably good for companies and economies in general to have the slack that gives space to innovate). And fundamentally I think we culturally strike the right balance of empirical results-oriented and broader high-level thinking in the West; from my experience management culture in Asia really /would/ be more effective if it were more collaborative and less authoritarian. But then of course I'm biased.
From my "lived experience" in non-profits, a very strong element of this nonsense and much of wokeness is just an effort to take power away from organizational leaders and distribute it more widely. This is explicit in the preference for more process and 'democratic' decision making, and implicit in the unwillingness to measure or work towards concrete goals, etc.
In concept there is nothing wrong with a greater emphasis on first hand experience with problems, but in practice it is a method where everyone can claim authority and there is no mechanism for reconciling differences other than who has the loudest voice. Imagine if you will a consumer reports assessment of a car's reliability - this is based on the "lived experience" of thousands of survey respondents. And yet in these spaces, a single person's particular experience is clearly going to be given even more weight.
Everybody loves 'equity.' But even though the meaning of equity is "equality of outcomes" (think of the popular graphic/meme of the kids on different sized boxes all being the same height), how much time and thought is given to actually reducing disparities in outcomes rather than processes? There isn't even much effort to explain much less test the idea that more "inclusive" process will produce better outcomes - for woke partisans, this isn't a legitimate question. This culture will clearly be more survivable in activities where the "process is the product" as it is in most of the non-profit space as opposed to the for-profit domain where there is a more measurable bottom line.
To the extent that this analysis is correct, I have two questions: 1. To what extent does this reflect the increasing empowerment of women? (much of these changes seem to reflect/resonate with some of the evidence as to sex differences in interpersonal/work styles) 2. To what extent does this reflect the overall disillusionment and even despair about the idea of progress among the young? (to the extent that there is no progress [no bend towards justice] process does matter more than outcomes - if you aren't getting any ware, you sure should be sure that you enjoy the trip).
Okay, I already ranted about why I hate this work. In its limited defense, I think what it is trying to do in a ham fisted way is to acknowledge that there are cultural differences in how people communicate and behave in groups. Some cultures tend to be emotionally expressive, some emotionally reserved. Some put the burden of communication primarily on the speaker, others on the listener. Some cultures place a higher value on collaborative decision-making while others are more comfortable with hierarchy. In some cultures it is viewed as more useful to make decisions slowly and thoughtfully even if results in unnecessary delays. some value urgency. None of these differences are based on race. But Anglo-American culture tends to favor emotionally reserved, direct communication where the burden of communication is primarily on the speaker. It also tends to prefer hierarchy and value efficiency over collaboration. If an organization is going to be able to function well in a multicultural or international setting then it needs to consider that there is more than one right way of doing something and that cultures vary this way because there is usually merit both side of the coin and being more open to alternative approaches can be inherently useful and make workplaces more inviting and comfortable places for people who do not come from primarily Anglo-American cultural backgrouds to work and share their insights and gifts. There is value in getting both quantitative and qualitative measurements of success because each can reveal different things. It can be useful to aim for process that balance efficiency and collaboration. Listening is as important to talking to make good decisions. So there is truth there it just doesn't really have a clear connection to "race" and it isn't presented with any complexity or nuance and so does more harm that good. It is also, frankly, pretty racist against POC folks while pretending to scold white people which is my least favorite form of preachy white supremacy.
I am someone who is racialized as White and who did a lot of my academic work, early professional work, and lifelong activism in the area of racial justice. I have been pretty dismayed by the way that Peggy MacIntosh's Article of Privilege, Robin D'Angelo's work on Whiteness, and Tema Okun's definition of White Supremacy culture have managed to suck all oxygen out the spaces that talk about racial injustice. These are all work by white people who self describe themselves as being oblivious about racial injustice for significant parts of their lives and then had the most basic glimpse of reality, wrote a really simplistic analysis of that, and made a huge name for themselves promoting that as a piece of expertise. None of these authors bring meaningful lived experience to the project. These white people discovered racism like Columbus discovered the new world. None have approached the issue with the kind of intellectual genius that people like James Baldwin, MLK, or W. E. B. Du Bois or the kind of academic rigor of kimberlé crenshaw but they are getting way more space in DEI trainings and progress groups than these other more serious scholars. I don't think this is an accident. None of these people's work require anyone to do anything, think very hard, or change anything. MacIntosh's article on White Privilege is garbage and if you say it is a mess people assume you mean that you don't think that white people are given unfair comparative advantages in material ways over Black people. Of course they are. What is a messy about the White Privilege framework is that messily conflates race with class; if fails to distinguish between areas where the advantage is purely comparative vs absolute; or what aspects are injustice because white people or given too much vs because Black people are given too little. Nor does it make any effort to explain what causes this privilege - explict racism, implict racism, inertia from historical racism, or institutional structures. And because nothing has a cause there is no need to suggest any concrete solutions other than checking one's privilege and possibly feeling bad about it which does zero to change anything. Okun just makes a bunch of racist assumptions about how people of different races think and behave, assigns most of the most successful ones in our culture to white people and then suggests that anyone requiring anyone to be successful is being racist which is, again, not a great recipe for getting any changes made that might fix any actual problem. I think they are popular for this very reason. They don't require anyone to make any changes and also allow white people to continue to act like "race" as opposed to "racism" is an objectively real thing, confirm that it is pretty helpful to them which is sad but not anything they can do anything about, and talk a lot about how the are white and why they are so logical which is pretty comforting if you actual implictly believe in white supremacy.
To her credit, she has discussed many of the ways her work has been misused, often in similar terms to critics such as Matt, and provided ongoing revisions. That takes a larger than average person to not double-down. Even her revised ideas may not end up totally socially constructive, or end up that way upon contact with society as it exists -but she's tried to clarify the way her stuff has been used was not what she at all intended.
Can confirm that this nonsense is being showcased in non-profits because I was in one of those. Can confirm that it was wild hearing a paid consultant say these things without irony. Can confirm that I promptly left the company not too long after these workshops. Can confirm that this kind of content created deep racial resentment rather than foster any productive dialogue.
I willingly concede that a lot of corporate training in general in of poor quality and that Okun's list in particular is not helpful to present to educators trying to get CE credits. It would be helpful if you wanted to start a cult, because it has all the "sealed-system" logic that you need to get things off the ground.
However, outside of the context of corporate training and city government and assorted school board meetings, I do think it's a valuable line of inquiry to ask, "What are the beliefs of dominant, mainstream American culture that keep so many of us believing in hierarchies of human value? Why don't we feel more responsibility to take good care of each other and our communities?"
I understand that going down some kind of philosophical wormhole is not the point of this post. But if we are going to upzone the fancy parts of town and fund public services and do all the big things, millions and millions more Americans will need to be persuaded that taking good care of each other is worth it.
The messaging of the Democratic party for basically my entire adult life has been to try and convince the median white voter, "Doing the big things is in your self-interest! This program will help so many middle class people!" and it just doesn't work. Over and over and over this has not worked, because if voters don't feel themselves in solidarity with their neighbors who are very different from them, any diverse coalition is trivially easy for a decent marketing campaign to break. Matt keeps writing that it's not the job of politicians to try and persuade anyone; it's just their job to get elected and do good politics. Fine. But then we do really have to change what people will vote **in the face of counter-attacks that trigger racial identity.** That means changing our cultural norms around who "we" are and what our responsibilities are to each other is important work. If this never happens, the politicians never follow.
Who is doing this work well? How could we be doing even better?
These are all good questions. I would suggest that indoctrinating people to believe that entire segments of their counterparts in society are basically irredeemably evil, and that they alone are responsible for the poisonous aspects of today’s society, will not accomplish social solidarity. Focusing on what we share in common and best practices without resort to demonization seems like the ticket to me. That is the exact opposite of the way the D&I industry is heading though.
I really dislike Okun's philosophy, but if I were going to defend it, I'd say it's a case of trying to name the cultural aspects of capitalism. Like, it's not just that capitalism produces inequality, but it also stretches its value system into every corner of our lives. If I were going to be less generous, I'd say some people just want to call everything they don't like "white supremacy" or "neoliberalism." And, like a broken clock, they'll sometimes be right, but most of the time not.
"Imagine yourself as a relatively privileged white person exhausted by meritocracy — an overworked student or a fretful parent or a school administrator constantly besieged by both. (Given the demographics of this paper’s readership, this may not require much imagination.)
"Wouldn’t it come as a relief, in some way, if it turned out that the whole 'exhausting "Alice in Wonderland" Red Queen Race of full-time meritocratic achievement,' in the words of a pseudonymous critic, was nothing more than a manifestation of the very white supremacy that you, as a good liberal, are obliged to dismantle and oppose? If all the testing, all the 'delayed gratification' and 'perfectionism,' was, after all, just itself a form of racism, and in easing up, chilling out, just relaxing a little bit, you can improve your life and your kid’s life and, happily, strike an anti-racist blow as well?"
"And what everyone has learned is that unless you want a whole new persona as a right-wing culture warrior, it’s best not to criticize anything that’s done in the name of racial justice."
Exactly. This is a totalitarian movement that seeks to control all thought and speech, a la 1984.
I am a STEM professor, and last summer my department was forced to put up a pro-BLM statement on our department's website. Never ever before had the department made any sort of political statement on any issue, not even ones in our purview like science funding.
If I had still been department chair, as I once was, I would have refused. I fear that there are not enough Havel's greengrocers to resist.
Theories like Okuns can also be tested - and found wanting - by applying the theoretical principles to non-white (or even non-American) societies. And what one finds is that the aspects Okun attributes to "white supremacy culture" are everywhere and are features of our species generally. They are not attributable to any specific culture, and certainly not "white" culture, whatever that means.
Most of this stuff is piffle. But I've actually seen an anti-racism training that served a purpose for UniteHERE: helping the diverse members of a fighting union understand each other enough so they can work together better -- against the bosses. Given the divides in the constituency, establishing a unified standard of behavior is worth a lot. https://unitehere.org/changing_lives/equity-and-civil-rights/
Guess I'm saying this doesn't have to be non-profit BS -- but probably only within oppositional institutions that are actually doing something.
I should leaf through my copy of DiAngelo to see what notes I made in it but I just need to give more context than this article can give, as good as it is addressing these issues, just because you all weren't around when this stuff started. I recall my professors in a counselor education program trying to find their footing in the early 70s in the face of things coming apart, especially around race. Bill said he thought since he was Canadian it didn't affect him until he realized he was living in it. The few minorities in this program of 60 grad students had to shoulder all the weight of educating White folk; that fell on me, too, since I was married to a Black woman. Sadly, two of the Blacks in the upper reaches of the grad program were total jerks who milked the admins for money with 'burn the mother down' threats and harassed my wife for being married to me. Through it all those profs had to deal with angry minorities, hurt White people (2 dropped out after a blue eyes/brown eyes demo with us as the kids - I got to sit up front b/c I'm brunette and blonds got pushed to the back-the explosion came when brunette friends walked over people they had gone on break with every day to mingle with other 'dark people' - it was very effective but emotionally devastating for some people).
Anyway, while I have enountered really nutty people doing what used to be called multicultural training until teachers got tired of Blacks and Browns and wanted to deal with White kids in wheel chairs and all the multiculturalism went to hell, we've never come back (I retired 10 years ago from teaching) but I hope with all the Okuns and DiAngelos going over the top you can see what they and many of us saw: that the bulk of White people were still wrapped up in the original Identity and don't want to let go and it's brought us Trump.
Having worked internationally a lot, it's especially hilarious to me that the emphasis on measurable hard outcomes and empiricism/objectivity is coded as "white" here and the mushy empathetic process/democratic/collaborative stuff is coded as "nonwhite"; as somewhat alluded to Mat's footnote there are many nonwhite cultures which go even harder on the metrics, testing, and rigor than Western culture. In fact I would say that in most non-western working cultures, it's actually completely inverted from Okun's framing - I've encountered a much stronger emphasis on authority, measurable outcomes, and the bottom line in Asian, Middle Eastern, and Eastern European work cultures and companies there often specific train their managers to adopt more collaborative and inclusive management styles when collaborating with Western/white colleagues.
My guess is it kind of just comes down to survive vs thrive strategies and how much slack an economy generally has (and to be clear, I agree with Thiel it's probably good for companies and economies in general to have the slack that gives space to innovate). And fundamentally I think we culturally strike the right balance of empirical results-oriented and broader high-level thinking in the West; from my experience management culture in Asia really /would/ be more effective if it were more collaborative and less authoritarian. But then of course I'm biased.
This aged well. Shockingly prescient.
From my "lived experience" in non-profits, a very strong element of this nonsense and much of wokeness is just an effort to take power away from organizational leaders and distribute it more widely. This is explicit in the preference for more process and 'democratic' decision making, and implicit in the unwillingness to measure or work towards concrete goals, etc.
In concept there is nothing wrong with a greater emphasis on first hand experience with problems, but in practice it is a method where everyone can claim authority and there is no mechanism for reconciling differences other than who has the loudest voice. Imagine if you will a consumer reports assessment of a car's reliability - this is based on the "lived experience" of thousands of survey respondents. And yet in these spaces, a single person's particular experience is clearly going to be given even more weight.
Everybody loves 'equity.' But even though the meaning of equity is "equality of outcomes" (think of the popular graphic/meme of the kids on different sized boxes all being the same height), how much time and thought is given to actually reducing disparities in outcomes rather than processes? There isn't even much effort to explain much less test the idea that more "inclusive" process will produce better outcomes - for woke partisans, this isn't a legitimate question. This culture will clearly be more survivable in activities where the "process is the product" as it is in most of the non-profit space as opposed to the for-profit domain where there is a more measurable bottom line.
To the extent that this analysis is correct, I have two questions: 1. To what extent does this reflect the increasing empowerment of women? (much of these changes seem to reflect/resonate with some of the evidence as to sex differences in interpersonal/work styles) 2. To what extent does this reflect the overall disillusionment and even despair about the idea of progress among the young? (to the extent that there is no progress [no bend towards justice] process does matter more than outcomes - if you aren't getting any ware, you sure should be sure that you enjoy the trip).
Okay, I already ranted about why I hate this work. In its limited defense, I think what it is trying to do in a ham fisted way is to acknowledge that there are cultural differences in how people communicate and behave in groups. Some cultures tend to be emotionally expressive, some emotionally reserved. Some put the burden of communication primarily on the speaker, others on the listener. Some cultures place a higher value on collaborative decision-making while others are more comfortable with hierarchy. In some cultures it is viewed as more useful to make decisions slowly and thoughtfully even if results in unnecessary delays. some value urgency. None of these differences are based on race. But Anglo-American culture tends to favor emotionally reserved, direct communication where the burden of communication is primarily on the speaker. It also tends to prefer hierarchy and value efficiency over collaboration. If an organization is going to be able to function well in a multicultural or international setting then it needs to consider that there is more than one right way of doing something and that cultures vary this way because there is usually merit both side of the coin and being more open to alternative approaches can be inherently useful and make workplaces more inviting and comfortable places for people who do not come from primarily Anglo-American cultural backgrouds to work and share their insights and gifts. There is value in getting both quantitative and qualitative measurements of success because each can reveal different things. It can be useful to aim for process that balance efficiency and collaboration. Listening is as important to talking to make good decisions. So there is truth there it just doesn't really have a clear connection to "race" and it isn't presented with any complexity or nuance and so does more harm that good. It is also, frankly, pretty racist against POC folks while pretending to scold white people which is my least favorite form of preachy white supremacy.
I am someone who is racialized as White and who did a lot of my academic work, early professional work, and lifelong activism in the area of racial justice. I have been pretty dismayed by the way that Peggy MacIntosh's Article of Privilege, Robin D'Angelo's work on Whiteness, and Tema Okun's definition of White Supremacy culture have managed to suck all oxygen out the spaces that talk about racial injustice. These are all work by white people who self describe themselves as being oblivious about racial injustice for significant parts of their lives and then had the most basic glimpse of reality, wrote a really simplistic analysis of that, and made a huge name for themselves promoting that as a piece of expertise. None of these authors bring meaningful lived experience to the project. These white people discovered racism like Columbus discovered the new world. None have approached the issue with the kind of intellectual genius that people like James Baldwin, MLK, or W. E. B. Du Bois or the kind of academic rigor of kimberlé crenshaw but they are getting way more space in DEI trainings and progress groups than these other more serious scholars. I don't think this is an accident. None of these people's work require anyone to do anything, think very hard, or change anything. MacIntosh's article on White Privilege is garbage and if you say it is a mess people assume you mean that you don't think that white people are given unfair comparative advantages in material ways over Black people. Of course they are. What is a messy about the White Privilege framework is that messily conflates race with class; if fails to distinguish between areas where the advantage is purely comparative vs absolute; or what aspects are injustice because white people or given too much vs because Black people are given too little. Nor does it make any effort to explain what causes this privilege - explict racism, implict racism, inertia from historical racism, or institutional structures. And because nothing has a cause there is no need to suggest any concrete solutions other than checking one's privilege and possibly feeling bad about it which does zero to change anything. Okun just makes a bunch of racist assumptions about how people of different races think and behave, assigns most of the most successful ones in our culture to white people and then suggests that anyone requiring anyone to be successful is being racist which is, again, not a great recipe for getting any changes made that might fix any actual problem. I think they are popular for this very reason. They don't require anyone to make any changes and also allow white people to continue to act like "race" as opposed to "racism" is an objectively real thing, confirm that it is pretty helpful to them which is sad but not anything they can do anything about, and talk a lot about how the are white and why they are so logical which is pretty comforting if you actual implictly believe in white supremacy.
To her credit, she has discussed many of the ways her work has been misused, often in similar terms to critics such as Matt, and provided ongoing revisions. That takes a larger than average person to not double-down. Even her revised ideas may not end up totally socially constructive, or end up that way upon contact with society as it exists -but she's tried to clarify the way her stuff has been used was not what she at all intended.
I'm massively late to the party on this thread, but to her credit, Tema Okun has gone through some effort since some point in 2021 to revise the 1999 worksheet with checklist items, and set up a website with ongoing updates that provides advise on not using the original and not misusing the revised writing. https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info. https://theintercept.com/2023/02/03/deconstructed-tema-okun-white-supremacy/
Can confirm that this nonsense is being showcased in non-profits because I was in one of those. Can confirm that it was wild hearing a paid consultant say these things without irony. Can confirm that I promptly left the company not too long after these workshops. Can confirm that this kind of content created deep racial resentment rather than foster any productive dialogue.
I willingly concede that a lot of corporate training in general in of poor quality and that Okun's list in particular is not helpful to present to educators trying to get CE credits. It would be helpful if you wanted to start a cult, because it has all the "sealed-system" logic that you need to get things off the ground.
However, outside of the context of corporate training and city government and assorted school board meetings, I do think it's a valuable line of inquiry to ask, "What are the beliefs of dominant, mainstream American culture that keep so many of us believing in hierarchies of human value? Why don't we feel more responsibility to take good care of each other and our communities?"
I understand that going down some kind of philosophical wormhole is not the point of this post. But if we are going to upzone the fancy parts of town and fund public services and do all the big things, millions and millions more Americans will need to be persuaded that taking good care of each other is worth it.
The messaging of the Democratic party for basically my entire adult life has been to try and convince the median white voter, "Doing the big things is in your self-interest! This program will help so many middle class people!" and it just doesn't work. Over and over and over this has not worked, because if voters don't feel themselves in solidarity with their neighbors who are very different from them, any diverse coalition is trivially easy for a decent marketing campaign to break. Matt keeps writing that it's not the job of politicians to try and persuade anyone; it's just their job to get elected and do good politics. Fine. But then we do really have to change what people will vote **in the face of counter-attacks that trigger racial identity.** That means changing our cultural norms around who "we" are and what our responsibilities are to each other is important work. If this never happens, the politicians never follow.
Who is doing this work well? How could we be doing even better?
These are all good questions. I would suggest that indoctrinating people to believe that entire segments of their counterparts in society are basically irredeemably evil, and that they alone are responsible for the poisonous aspects of today’s society, will not accomplish social solidarity. Focusing on what we share in common and best practices without resort to demonization seems like the ticket to me. That is the exact opposite of the way the D&I industry is heading though.
I really dislike Okun's philosophy, but if I were going to defend it, I'd say it's a case of trying to name the cultural aspects of capitalism. Like, it's not just that capitalism produces inequality, but it also stretches its value system into every corner of our lives. If I were going to be less generous, I'd say some people just want to call everything they don't like "white supremacy" or "neoliberalism." And, like a broken clock, they'll sometimes be right, but most of the time not.
A really interesting corollary to this argument is this great NYT column by Ross Douthat: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/opinion/sunday/white-fragility-meritocracy.html
"Imagine yourself as a relatively privileged white person exhausted by meritocracy — an overworked student or a fretful parent or a school administrator constantly besieged by both. (Given the demographics of this paper’s readership, this may not require much imagination.)
"Wouldn’t it come as a relief, in some way, if it turned out that the whole 'exhausting "Alice in Wonderland" Red Queen Race of full-time meritocratic achievement,' in the words of a pseudonymous critic, was nothing more than a manifestation of the very white supremacy that you, as a good liberal, are obliged to dismantle and oppose? If all the testing, all the 'delayed gratification' and 'perfectionism,' was, after all, just itself a form of racism, and in easing up, chilling out, just relaxing a little bit, you can improve your life and your kid’s life and, happily, strike an anti-racist blow as well?"
Has Matt ever had any public conversations with John McWhorter? It seems like this piece hits many of the points that John frequently makes.
Yes, McWhorter was on The Weeds last year, it was a good chat: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-awokening/id1042433083?i=1000486672252
thanks!
"And what everyone has learned is that unless you want a whole new persona as a right-wing culture warrior, it’s best not to criticize anything that’s done in the name of racial justice."
Exactly. This is a totalitarian movement that seeks to control all thought and speech, a la 1984.
I am a STEM professor, and last summer my department was forced to put up a pro-BLM statement on our department's website. Never ever before had the department made any sort of political statement on any issue, not even ones in our purview like science funding.
If I had still been department chair, as I once was, I would have refused. I fear that there are not enough Havel's greengrocers to resist.
Theories like Okuns can also be tested - and found wanting - by applying the theoretical principles to non-white (or even non-American) societies. And what one finds is that the aspects Okun attributes to "white supremacy culture" are everywhere and are features of our species generally. They are not attributable to any specific culture, and certainly not "white" culture, whatever that means.
Most of this stuff is piffle. But I've actually seen an anti-racism training that served a purpose for UniteHERE: helping the diverse members of a fighting union understand each other enough so they can work together better -- against the bosses. Given the divides in the constituency, establishing a unified standard of behavior is worth a lot. https://unitehere.org/changing_lives/equity-and-civil-rights/
Guess I'm saying this doesn't have to be non-profit BS -- but probably only within oppositional institutions that are actually doing something.