I'm not an "organizer" and I have spent 50 years avoiding "leadership," but I do think about it sometimes. I often think about the pitfalls and hurdles of #organizing for any positive social change. On my mind lately is how personal motivations and incentives can interact with systemic/structural things to make change difficult.
Because I'm in #higherEd, I'm thinking about two things rn:
#University administrators (deans, provosts, presidents, directors, etc.) consistently act like Republican Senators or corporate CEOs when they make policy decisions and interact with "underlings". They can be seen as filling spots that might otherwise have been filled by people who would act in the public interest; they frequently prevent public-interest actions. The #profit-driven US system has installed them there, blocking change from the #faculty and #students from going "higher," and blocking information, resources and also possibly change from coming "down" to the students and faculty. Administrators, I think, have crippling career expectations, often unwritten, that lead them to act almost according to a script, while also clinging to their positions with a deathgrip and often developing a bad case of chip-on-the-shoulder #authoritarianism while doing it.
The #facebook group "the professor is out" (TPIO) is for faculty in toxic situations wanting advice and support in #leavingAcademia. Great. However, within a year or two of the group's formation, it was very popular so the creators (apparently) quit or lost their day jobs and seem to have made TPIO their entire income stream. They started selling #merch, coaching, workshops, etc. And they started blocking messages threatening their income, like offers of help from "competing" entities and posts questioning the wisdom of guiding all fleeing academics into doing #dataScience or #UX for the companies that fund the politicians defunding higher ed. The mods gotta pay rent, and now the only way they do this (not to mention staying alive if they get sick) is to generate income from this group.
That's all. It's just a tangled, not always helpful #system. It has evolved to protect itself, in interesting (and frustrating) ways.
