What Remains Open

The most consequential open question about the founding team concerns selection and self-selection. The chapter has described what the work requires. But the process through which people who have those capacities find the work — and through which people who do not have them are honestly informed before committing — is a governance question that has no clean answer. Selection processes that assess the required capacities risk being exclusionary in ways that reproduce existing privilege. Purely voluntary self-selection tends to attract people whose attraction to the vision exceeds their realistic self-assessment of their capacities for the work. How the institution navigates this tension is among the most difficult founding governance questions it faces.