There was no reason for this. Chicago’s Art Institute, one of the oldest,1879, and largest museums in the country, has apparently gone woke. They fired 122 people, and this had nothing to do with pay or work ethic. These people were so devoted they were volunteering their time. But the museum fired them because they were mostly white women and the museum wanted more diversity.
“…a weaselly letter was sent out Sept. 3 by Veronica Stein, the Woman’s Board executive director of learning and engagement at the Art Institute of Chicago. The recipients were the museum’s 150 or so volunteer docents, a beloved mainstay of the venerable cultural institution for decades and the main providers of fine, learned tours to Chicagoans, tourists, students from Chicago Public Schools and myriad other visitors to our great museum.
Once you cut through the blather, the letter basically said the museum had looked critically at its corps of docents, a group dominated by mostly (but not entirely) white, retired women with some time to spare, and found them wanting as a demographic.
No matter that the docents had typically trained for years, if not decades, on how to describe the Art Institute’s collection, or worked hard on adjusting to the trendy new ways (”Art and Activism”) of describing the work to be found there, or put in hour after hour in academic study of their fields.
Thus the museum had decided to can the whole lot of them, replacing the group with a small number of paid educators working longer hours.”
“Frankly, the museum would certainly have had a tough lawsuit on its hands for age and race discrimination (there were laws against that, last time we checked) were it not for one thing: Everyone being nixed was a volunteer. And, as at least one docent found out after contacting the AARP, volunteers are not covered by federal employment laws. We’ll wager museum lawyers had pointed that out.”
This is really trashy on the museum’s part. They clearly discriminated against the white women, they fired them just because they were not people of color.