How Online Rage Invaded a Victorian-Era Intellectual Retreat

New York Times

03-04-2025

The rebel leader believed success was in hand: An autocrat deposed, tyranny on the run, one of America's oldest cultural institutions rescued from disaster.
'We used classic guerrilla tactics,' said Twig Branch, the rebel leader, savoring his victory. He and a small band of allies had successfully ousted the president of Chautauqua Institution, a 151-year-old resort and cultural center that every summer attracts authors, musicians, playwrights and public intellectuals to its 750-acre lakeside campus in western New York. 'We established a sophisticated spy network. We carefully designed a cellular network of provocateurs.'
It is an institution that could never be created today. Imagine a tent revival crossed with a TED Talk, but it started in 1874, and it's also a gated community of Victorian cottages, Doric-columned churches, a 36-hole golf course, ballet studios and an amphitheater, all of it crowded onto a gently sloping hillside by a 17-mile-long lake.
This year the institution expects to attract about 100,000 visitors seeking cultural enrichment. People who attend the entire summer session will pay an entrance fee of $3,077 to spend nine weeks immersed in lectures, ballet, opera and symphony performances, plus pleasant lake breezes and streetscapes reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting. (Housing, food and all other expenses are not included.)
But underneath this genteel surface are bitter divisions that erupted just as the institution struggled to recover from the worst event ever to happen on its campus, when Salman Rushdie was nearly killed onstage by a knife-wielding jihadist in August 2022.
One splinter group, led by Mr. Branch — a retired insurance salesman who describes himself, only half-jokingly, as a 'newcomer' whose family has visited Chautauqua for only four generations — cultivated allies on the board of trustees to rat on their enemies. They lurked on Zoom calls to spy on executive staff meetings and published an almost daily drumbeat of blog posts calling for the entire administration to be sacked. They argued that Michael Hill, the president, and the board of trustees had abandoned Chautauqua's traditions and campus in a doomed effort to turn their unique gem into a resort as anodyne as Disneyland.
Simultaneously, other constituencies became angry about other issues. Jewish leaders were incensed by Mr. Hill's response to writings by a Chautauqua staff member that struck many as antisemitic. Conservatives fought what they viewed as leftist bias in cultural programming by organizing a speaker series of their own, while claiming that their group remained unwelcome on campus.
For all its internal schisms, Chautauqua Institution is probably in its best financial shape since it was founded in 1874. The endowment sits at $145 million, and last year the nonprofit raised $37 million from donors, both all-time highs. The institution is on track to complete a $150-million fund-raising campaign in 2025, a year ahead of schedule.
Uncertainty and hurt feelings remain. Members of one prominent family feuded in public, each side accusing the other of destroying the place they love.
Chautauqua's culture of agreeable disagreement failed. Some wonder if it can be reclaimed.
'We are a community in crisis,' said Kendall Crolius, 71, an author and retired leadership consultant who has visited Chautauqua since 1999. 'We have to have change, or we're not going to survive.'
'Treated like an unwelcome relative'
When George Saunders was a young author, working for an engineering company in Rochester and writing inventive short stories in his spare time, he dreamed of receiving an invitation from the Chautauqua Institution to give a talk about his work. This summer — nine books and a MacArthur 'genius' grant later — Mr. Saunders finally will get his wish. As an artist in residence, he will work with the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra and New York's Metropolitan Opera to reimagine his novel, the Booker Prize-winning 'Lincoln in the Bardo,' as an opera.
'I'm really looking forward to it,' Mr. Saunders, who lives in California but still teaches creative writing at Syracuse University in upstate New York, said. 'With books, it's all in your own head, and that gets a little repetitious,' he said. 'But here we get to all work together, and it's just a magical process that unfolds.'
Pairing one of the nation's most celebrated authors with its most famous opera company would seem to be a serious coup. But to Chautauqua Institution's old guard it barely counts as opera, since it will include no full-dress, wildly expensive performance.
'The opera has been severely crippled,' said Stephen Glinick, a dermatologist who started spending summers at Chautauqua in 1983. He also publishes The Gadfly, a blog with a small audience but an outsize role in stoking rage against Mr. Hill and the board of trustees.
The Gadfly has run dozens of letters from readers about the deterioration of the institution's campus. Some described broken mosaic tiles at the Hall of Philosophy, an open-air structure that resembles the Parthenon. Others raged about the closure of the cinema and a coffee gazebo.
'Chautauqua is on fire! A four alarm fire!' Mark and Dianne Foglesong, visitors since 1976, wrote in a letter to The Gadfly. 'The physical infrastructure is visibly decaying before us.'
Others were angry at what they viewed as secretive leadership. After the attack on Mr. Rushdie, the board locked the doors to the administration building, called the Colonnade. Gadfly readers were outraged by the effrontery.
'We are the foundation of Chautauqua,' Caroline Van Kirk Bissell, a regular visitor since 1946, wrote. 'Yet we are locked out of the Colonnade and treated like an unwelcome relative.'
Nearly all Gadfly commenters blamed the problems on Mr. Hill, whom they described as an aloof leader so focused on burnishing the institution's national reputation that he neglected the essentials that make Chautauqua unique.
'Michael has been a complete failure as mayor of Chautauqua,' said Rick Rieser, an annual Chautauqua visitor since the 1980s.
For all its town-like qualities, Mr. Hill pointed out, Chautauqua Institution operates like any nonprofit corporation in New York State.
'I'm not the mayor,' he said. 'This is not a town.'
The Gadfly will not have Michael Hill to kick around anymore. He will leave Chautauqua in May to become president of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia.
His successor faces what Mr. Hill describes as an existential threat: The institution operates year-round, but it relies on a nine-week summer session to earn most of the revenue to cover its $53.3 million budget. Trimming the opera program was a first step in modernizing the institution's finances, Mr. Hill said. More off-season arts fellowships and concerts, as well as a series of international educational trips called Chautauqua Travels, will help.
'We've got the majority of our revenue eggs in a summer basket,' Mr. Hill said. 'That's a problem.'
Smaller infrastructure problems are more easily resolved. Visitors to the Colonnade can ring a doorbell and be allowed inside. The doors were locked after the Rushdie attack, when a security consultant described the former open-door policy as 'lunacy,' Mr. Hill said.
On a campus tour in early March, Mr. Hill pointed to construction sites for a new theater building and a rebuilt dormitory. He stopped his Volvo S.U.V. in front of the coffee gazebo and the cinema, both of which will reopen this summer.
'Reopening June!' said Mr. Hill, reading the cinema's marquee. 'We literally put it in lights.'
The accusations, however, that the institution's leaders are neither approachable nor communicative will linger after Mr. Hill's departure.
In January, the institution celebrated a fellowship won by Rafia Khader, the director of religious programs and the first Muslim hired as a member of the organization's full-time staff. In a post on the institution's website, Mr. Hill praised her for offering a 'more nuanced understanding of faith with a focus on dialogue.'
The post (now deleted) linked to Ms. Khader's winning essay, in which she described the Hamas terrorist attacks of Oct. 7 as a 'momentous October day' and referred to the 'Al-Aqsa Flood,' the name Hamas gave the attacks against Israel.
Leaders of three Jewish organizations at Chautauqua were shocked by what they viewed as institutional support for antisemitism.
'Michael Hill's endorsement of Rafia's writing has created an unsafe situation for Jews at Chautauqua,' five Jewish leaders wrote in January in a letter to the board of trustees. 'The time for dialogue is over.'
Ms. Khader exchanged emails with several of the Jewish leaders that frustrated both sides. Three weeks after the initial news release, Mr. Hill and Ms. Khader sent a joint email to the community. The message did not address antisemitism.
'We have an opportunity to demonstrate — and have for 150 years demonstrated — how people of diverging faiths, beliefs and perspectives can engage and be in community together,' Mr. Hill wrote.
Three weeks after the statement was released, in mid-February, Ms. Khader resigned.
'By acknowledging the suffering of Palestinians, I was attempting to invite Muslims back into interfaith dialogue,' Ms. Khader said in an email in February. 'It is unfortunate that some people misconstrued my words and my intent.'
In retrospect, Mr. Hill said, he should have refuted antisemitism more forcefully.
'I regret we didn't move faster,' he said in a recent interview. 'The pace at which we were moving was telegraphing that we didn't care. Nothing could be further from the truth.'
'It wasn't pleasant'
This week, Chautauqua Institution announced that an interim replacement for Mr. Hill will be named soon. The next president must address a question at the heart of the institution's identity: Is Chautauqua, founded as a training center for Methodist Sunday school teachers, still the last place in America where people from every political tribe can debate charged topics and still enjoy one another's company?
'The Gadfly has poisoned the well of good will that holds our community together, but not in a fatal way,' said Phil Lerman, who has been visiting Chautauqua for 25 years. 'Yes, the institution has to change. But in changing, it has to stay true to its core values.'
Critics claim that the institution's liberal bent veered too far to the left under Mr. Hill. One lecture series, organized by the Ford Foundation, featured four days of talks in which speakers were 'talking about white privilege and looking at us,' said Mr. Rieser, a Democrat. 'It wasn't pleasant. They berated the audience.'
Conservatives gathered to push back. Their group, now called Advocates for a Balanced Chautauqua, raises money from about 1,000 supporters to bring conservative speakers to campus, said Paul Anthony, its leader.
'He allows people who are in accordance with his ideological vision,' Mr. Anthony said of Mr. Hill.
Chautauqua already brings many conservatives to speak, said Deborah Sunya Moore, who runs the institution's cultural programs. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, will partner with Chautauqua for a week of events this summer.
The A.B.C. conservatives also tend to favor speakers who may be too radical for the institution's mainstream tastes. Guests have included Mary Holland, leader of Children's Health Defense, the group formerly led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that spreads anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, and John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a climate-change skeptic.
Ms. Moore was careful not to disparage the conservatives' choices in speakers. For its own stages, however, Chautauqua seeks a certain kind of intellectual. 'People who are not purposefully going to be a flamethrower,' Ms. Moore said. 'The point is not debate. It's dialogue.'
With the shocking exception of the attack on Mr. Rushdie, a certain sense of decorum is still observed at even the most contentious lectures. But the recent vitriol online may threaten the peaceable mood of the campus, particularly when Steve Glinick moves from Rhode Island to his summer home at Chautauqua, where his daughter, Emily Glinick, lives year-round.
As publisher of The Gadfly, Mr. Glinick is perhaps Chautauqua's most controversial resident. Ms. Glinick manages the Chautauqua Theater Company. In a letter to her father's blog, she took exception to his campaign against Mr. Hill, which she described as 'meanspirited at best and abusive at worst.'
Mr. Glinick has no regrets.
'This is combat,' he said in a phone interview. 'If I made some enemies, the ends justified the means.'
For all the rage directed against him, Mr. Hill said he was not deposed as president; his departure in May is his choice. When he heard Mr. Branch's tale that lifelong Chautauquans — mostly wealthy, liberal retirees — morphed into guerrillas, spies and provocateurs to get him fired, Mr. Hill sighed.
'Ugh,' he said. 'Get a life, man.'