I have this suspicion that I just can't shake that most of the insiders in left-sympathetic institutions would be perfectly happy to turn all of the establishments they've inherited into community gardens. It's like the community garden is the final evolutionary telos for the predominant type of mainline protestantism, liberal arts colleges, etc.
"The Library Board had decided that when the bloodthirsty tycoon Abraham H Parnassus built the Cathedral of Truth with the mission 'to render from that slumbering continent of Man his vital and Promethean magma of Reason,' we think that he really meant that people should be kind and gentle and the kindest and gentlest thing we can think of is to just have a nice empty lot with some half-assed sunflowers in it where hobos will sleep on the bench."
I think there was a switcheroo in the 60s where a lot of Faustian progressivism got retranslated as "do good stuff in general," and since then "good stuff" has been interpreted by left-sympathetic people as "end (what we consider to be) oppression."
And it almost goes without saying that the academic left has been hard at work redefining everything from parking tickets to literacy standards as oppression.
So now the Abraham H Parnassus Fund is emptying its treasury to pay for parking tickets.
By redefining the goal of the Abraham H Parnassus Fund from "educate people in this particular place" to "hashtag resisting whatever Ingroup has targeted as Oppression," the Fund has given itself a vertiginous expansion of freedom. This, in turn, requires that the Fund must vastly expand its operations to include voluminous quarterly reviews in which all directors must regularly write their own objectives and define their own metrics -- or failing that, the Fund has to hire Metrics Consultants.
