Open Markets is exactly the kind of project that a top think tank should host. Barry Lynn is widely regarded as a catalyzing force in putting monopolization on the national agenda. Quite apart from the disruption to his project team and its activities, he said it was a deeply troubling episode because “it’s important that there are safe spaces for work that challenges concentrated economic power.”Įven if you do buy Anne-Marie Slaughter’s version of events, it casts her and New America in a negative light. Rather, Lynn described this as “a pretty simple story” of a powerful donor trying to muffle a dissenting voice. Lynn rejected the idea that his failure to follow process was the reason he was asked to leave New America. Various funders have ceased backing the organization in the past. Over its history, New America’s ideologically eclectic mix of fellows and project staff have regularly caused controversy with their positions-including with their colleagues, NAF board members and donors. Just 10 days earlier, on June 16, Open Markets had condemned Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods. One reason he liked New America so much from its earliest days is because scholars “always had freedom.” Statements of the kind that he made on June 27-criticizing powerful institutions or people-were hardly unusual at NAF. Lynn told me that he had hoped to continue working at the organization for years to come. keeping a funder happy-are more compatible than they might seem. Indeed, the two competing explanations of what happened at NAF-a management conflict vs. That Slaughter and Lynn could have a falling out along these lines is plausible. More broadly, CEOs of all institutions hate being blindsided by public statements that piss off important stakeholders. But one of those emails also makes it pretty clear that a problem with Lynn’s behavior was that he was jeopardizing NAF’s funding from Google.įrom my own experience working at a think tank, I can testify to the tensions that can develop when senior staff are seen acting too independently or in ways that alienate key funders or allies. The New America Foundation released emails by Slaughter to Lynn in which she voices these complaints and stresses that their relationship broke down for reasons that have nothing to do with Google. In this telling, Lynn’s June 27 statement on the EU antitrust penalty was the final straw in an increasingly difficult relationship. In a longer statement, Slaughter said Lynn was booted because “his repeated refusal to adhere to New America’s standards of openness and institutional collegiality meant that we could no longer work together as part of the same institution.”Ī source close to the situation told me that Slaughter’s issue with Lynn was that he operated too independently, failing to abide by internal protocols to give advance notice of public statements that might affect the institution or programs within it. On Twitter, Anne-Marie Slaughter called that Times story “absolutely false.” Google also denied the story. But Lynn told me that he felt it was important that the real story be known, which is how the New York Times article came about. Over the past two months, Lynn and New America had been working on the details of his exit that would include a statement presenting the move as a mutually agreed-upon spinoff of Open Markets. The team is now camped out at a WeWork shared office space in Washington. Lynn told me that at the June meeting with Slaughter, he was given two months-until September 1-to leave New America with his staff of six people. When I spoke to Barry Lynn yesterday, he repeated these same details while stressing his deep admiration for New America, where he worked for 15 years. He said he also felt pressure to alter the program of an event he organized last year that featured Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading critic of corporate power. But this wasn’t the first time that Lynn had found himself in hot water at New America. It was that June 27 statement that reportedly triggered Schmidt’s complaint. The Times reported that Slaughter told him that the “time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways” in late June, just days after Lynn praised a $2.7 billion antitrust penalty imposed on Google by the European Union. Lynn has been a leading critic of the growing clout of Google and other business giants. The story, as described by Times reporter Ken Vogel, is that the Open Markets project at New America-which is run by Barry Lynn and challenges monopolization and the “extreme consolidation of economic power”-was asked to leave the think tank after Eric Schmidt complained to Slaughter about its work. The reputation of think tanks took another hit this week, when the New York Times reported that Anne-Marie Slaughter, president of the New America Foundation, ousted a project from the organization that was critical of Google.
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