Open Questions

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.