We All Work at the New York Times Now
Why some American institutions lost their moorings
Four years ago, I contributed an essay entitled “We All Work at the New York Times Now,” to an online magazine called Areo. Alas, Areo is no more, a victim of the cruel economics of digital publishing. I have chosen to republish the essay here, mostly because I didn’t want it to disappear forever. Although a lot has changed since I wrote it, I think the piece holds up pretty well. It also foreshadows the book that I have just completed for Oxford University Press, which is on the challenges of running a nonprofit during the culture wars. Stay tuned for more details about the book, which should be out by the end of the year.
A few years ago, writing for New York magazine, Andrew Sullivan issued a memorable lament: “We all live on campus now.” Sullivan argued that important norms of liberal behavior were being undermined by “an identity-based ‘social justice’ movement” that had successfully migrated from college campuses into the real world.
If anything, Sullivan’s dictum feels more true today than it did when he first issued it in 2018. Indeed, it may be necessary to issue a new corollary: We all work at the New York Times now.
As has been well documented, the Times has had a tough couple of years, lurching from crisis to crisis, bracketed by two high-profile resignations (James Bennet and Donald McNeil, Jr.) that seem to have effectively been compelled by staff mutinies.
But the Times is more harbinger than outlier. Look around and you will see staff revolts over issues of racial and social justice roiling a broad swath of organizations. (Just to name a few: Teen Vogue, Bon Appetit, adidas, Museum of Modern Art, Planned Parenthood…the list goes on.)
What’s going on here? Are we in the midst of what Wesley Yang has labeled an ideological succession, with old-school, big-tent liberalism giving way to something more radical (and illiberal)? Have some of our most important institutions lost their moorings?
For many critics, the answer is simple: Yes. They lay the blame at the feet of feckless administrators caving in to the loudest voices on social media. Indeed, dunking on the New York Times has become a cottage industry on Twitter.
While there are, of course, failures of leadership aplenty, many of the men and women charged with leading our beleaguered institutions are doing the best they can in extremely trying circumstances. Indeed, many don’t even know what hit them. Those looking for answers would be well advised to turn to two relatively obscure and idiosyncratic thinkers: John O’Sullivan and Jerry Pournelle.
O’Sullivan is a British conservative who worked for Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. He would go on to edit National Review and head up a think tank in Budapest. But he is best known for issuing O’Sullivan’s Law: "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” The Ford Foundation is the paradigmatic example of this rule – an organization founded by the head of one of the most successful capitalist enterprises in the world that has morphed into the leading voice of social justice around the globe.
But an inexorable pull to the left isn’t the only thing that today’s leaders have to contend with. That’s where Jerry Pournelle comes in. Pournelle, a science-fiction writer, is credited with coining the “iron law” of bureaucracy, which states that in any organization there are two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Pournelle argues that, ultimately, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization. Evidence of this dynamic can be seen at many American nonprofit organizations, which are spending increasing amounts of time and energy on the care and feeding of their staff members rather than on accomplishing their missions.
Three chaotic forces have exacerbated the tendencies identified by Pournelle and O’Sullivan: social media, the Covid pandemic, and Donald Trump. Social media has incentivized outrage and made it easier than ever before to organize the aggrieved. The pandemic, and the resulting move to Zoom and other virtual forums for many workplaces, has made it more difficult for leaders to make a human connection with their teams. And much of the staff unrest, particularly within American institutions, has been a displaced resistance to the Trump presidency -- a way of registering dissent at a moment when it seemed that Trump was beyond the reach of mortal intervention.
Up until last year, I was the executive director of a large nonprofit organization. I struggled mightily, and not always successfully, to create an environment that welcomed ideological diversity. Based on my experience, what is currently happening within American institutions is less an abdication of leadership and more an example of administrators responding on the fly and in real time to the urgently expressed needs and desires of their employees. In many cases, the heads of organizations are simply making pragmatic decisions to protect their agencies from losing the support of staff and key constituents.
So what is to be done if you find yourself at the helm of an organization roiled by internal unrest over issues of social justice? One answer is simply to bide your time. The Trump presidency is over. The free-floating outrage that the former president engendered will not disappear entirely, but it is likely to dissipate over time, helping to lower the temperature within many organizations.
Another approach might be to allow for a multiplicity of perspectives on controversial issues within any given agency. The days of organizations speaking with a single voice may be over -- the issues that confront us these days are simply too complex and our polity too fractured. Even as leaders issue official statements on behalf of their agencies, they would be wise to allow for “minority reports” -- statements by staff who disagree with the position the organization has taken and feel strongly about articulating their dissent. This would also have the benefit of helping to bolster institutional legitimacy at a moment when many are seeking increased transparency from their organizations. Perhaps the leadership at the Times could have avoided letting Bennet and McNeil go, if dissidents had been allowed to voice their displeasure in a formal minority report.
The challenge for institutional leaders is to navigate a course that avoids both knee-jerk capitulation to the demands of their most radical staffers and waging symbolic battles that will only drain the energy and diminish the effectiveness of their agencies. This kind of patient and tactical approach to managing institutional tensions might seem cowardly and insufficient to some anti-woke advocates seeking the catharsis of confrontation. But leaders can only govern with the consent of the governed and few people are interested in being martyrs for abstract causes like “free speech” or “due process.”
Running organizations is hard work even in the best of times. It has become even more challenging of late. All those scolds dunking on the Times on Twitter should take heed: what has happened at the Times will soon come for their organizations, if it hasn’t already.