what is clear to me

by now it is clear that you aren’t returning my check; it is clear that you didn’t keep your commitment to provide reprints, or return my check.

it is clear that your structure is the same as any other business, run simply, sloppily made rules, carried out by functionaries aware of their vacation, treating research requests as interruptions.

I expect dishonesty, false promises from a profit business; that is the founding basis of opaque blind commerce. That shouldn’t be  the basis or philosophy for a non-profit, otherwise, there is no need to make tax or structural distinction among them. If they act the same, they are the same.

now isn’t then;

then when Visual Studies Workshop was a fertile place, bold: attracting the committed, driven by a mission spirit, with a goal of a broadening, rather than a deadening future. a place beyond the market drivers, something other than a tax deduction.

what may not be clear to you

is how much VSW has changed. what you were, and what you’ve become; where you were headed, and how far off course you’ve gotten.

Turning a non-profit into an organization that is as layered, with interactions like a profit business is pretense and false promise. It is also bad mimicry. No small business succeeds with so much pretentious departmentalization over such small amounts of money. They would die of overhead and organizational inertia.