Pros
Working with peers who care deeply about advancing a humanist vision of society in which decisions are informed by science and all people are respected without regard for their religious views or lack thereof.
Cons
How much time you got, reader? I see some pleasant sentiments in the reviews below but I can think of a half dozen recently separated key personnel who might tell a different story if they were asked. For now I guess it’s up to me to play the foil. Since its 2016 merger with the Richard Dawkins Foundation, myopic leadership has transformed CFI into a self-licking ice cream cone where ethics and substance are cast aside in pursuit of status and prestige. Far and away, leadership’s approval is reserved for efforts to aggrandize the Center for Inquiry and the personhood of board member Richard Dawkins. CFI is plagued by an *incredibly* toxic work climate. President and CEO Robyn Blumner is the quintessential “missing stair:" with the apparent approval of CFI’s Board of Directors, untold amounts of staff time and energy are devoted to quietly working around the obstacles posed by her inexperience and vindictive narcissism. After years of taking extraordinary measures to reinstate some semblance of professionalized management, CFI’s employees are now largely resigned to their lot as inert subjects of Blumner’s whim. Blumner exhibits a pattern of singling out an isolated employee to treat as her personal assistant, moving from person to person until she finds someone who can’t or won’t stand up for themselves. She seems to reserve a special contempt for young women who don’t treat her with deference. Please know that even if there are layers of management between your position and Blumner’s, your immediate supervisors will not be able (nor, in too many cases, be willing) to protect you from her capricious mismanagement. She freely circumvents department heads, imposing disciplinary measures on their subordinates without so much as cc'ing them in an email about it. Blumner responds to employee concerns, including but not limited to those about racial diversity, inclusion, and other organizational ethics, by mischaracterizing them or suppressing them as potential acts of insubordination. She rewards complicity, silence, and amoralism. Blumner has imposed a committed amateurism upon CFI’s operations. Her reasoning is astonishingly crude, bordering on vulgar. On a whim, she’ll order an employee to singlehandedly undertake some under-considered scheme, sweeping in scope, that in any well-managed organization would be treated as a cross-departmental project subject to diligent planning and analysis before being approved, much less executed. At the same time, she engineers each situation to avoid the possibility that her assertions will be contradicted. If a member of staff corrects a trivial oversight of Blumner’s in some email exchange, she will reply hours later to defend herself obviously having spent much of the day fuming about it. Sometimes she concludes the exchange by spitefully imposing on a work project some onerous requirement that had apparently never factored into consideration before that moment. She resolves perceived slights by engaging in power games. When we worked in the DC office building, I would close my office door and turn off my lights at the end of each day. Apparently I did something to get under her skin, because at some point Blumner began arriving before me each morning to throw open my door and turn on the lights without asking or even mentioning it to me. She would then walk past the other two offices between hers and mine without touching the door or the lights. (Yes, it was her. I have the receipts.) If you mention personal illness, she’ll ask invasive questions as if to determine whether you did something to bring it upon yourself. In many organizations, the CEO's intellectual hygiene is probably irrelevant to the everyday work culture. But then most CEOs don't claim that their organization has truth and reason on its side. In CFI's case, Blumner's intellectual habits serve as an ever-present reminder of its hypocrisy. She is prone to unconstrained speculation on highly consequential issues in which she apparently never asks herself, "what might I have failed to consider here?” For example, Blumner has a long history of promoting misogynistic pseudoscience in opposition to advocates of gender equality. Her opinion articles (they're always opinion articles, published in formats where there is no professional consequence for consistently bungling consequential issues) are replete with sex essentialism that misrepresents the science of genetics, culture, and society. At least two of her opinion pieces have been republished uncritically by Men’s Rights Activist websites, including an argument that the Equal Rights Amendment should be ratified because too many men are denied child custody in divorce agreements. That piece was later cited in a William and Mary Law Review journal article as an example of sympathy in the media for domestic abusers. This brings us to her view of race. A similarly aggressive ignorance drives Blumner’s view of racial inequality, which in turn informs her managerial approach to race and diversity. Only one or two nonwhite people are ever among CFI’s dozens of employees and they are propped up as tokens to deflect the obvious whiteness of the organization while being prevented from exercising any influence over its decision making. Another issue is Blumner's use of the tactics of abusers to protect Richard Dawkins from accountability. Blumner tries to foster a creepy hero worship of Dawkins, overstating his centrality to CFI's mission and acting mystified when employees in an organization predicated on intellectual curiosity don’t follow her lead. When staff privately express concerns about his unprofessional or unethical conduct, Blumner deflects to Dawkins' previous accomplishments. She claims that the movement depends on him for its survival despite the fact that his spurious views have only become more egregious in recent years and the movement will obviously need to overcome his absence soon, very possibly during her tenure as CEO. Having established that CFI’s staff languish under the thumb of a toxic, incompetent manager with no business at the helm of an organization that purports to be about science and secularism, I turn now to the organization’s pay and benefits. Benefits are below industry standard, especially vacation time and flexible scheduling. As for pay, CFI employees are generally underpaid relative to their peers in comparable nonprofit organizations, in some cases by tens of thousands of dollars. Wanna guess who is the exception? Robyn Blumner enjoys the highest reported total compensation of any of the CEOs of the five big nonprofits that dominate the national “secular” activism movement (the other four being American Atheists, American Humanist Association, Freedom From Religion Foundation, and Secular Coalition for America). Somehow, the compensation for CEO leapt by more than 60% between Blumner and her predecessor. Consider the following: In 2015, then-President and CEO Ronald Lindsay’s reported total compensation was approximately $100,000. After a lengthy transition period, Blumner assumed both titles in 2017. That year, her total compensation was more than $160,000. In 2018, her compensation increased again to almost $172,000. How were these huge pay increases justified by the board of a purportedly humanist organization that keeps its junior staff trapped in financial precarity? We might never know because according to Charity Navigator, CFI is the only one of the eligible big five secular groups that lacks a transparent process for determining CEO compensation, and also the only one that lacks a publicly available independent financial review. For his part, Richard Dawkins is an anchor dragging CFI down from the moral high ground, shielded from accountability in his role as an ambassador of the organization. He uses Twitter as a cognitive toilet where his undisciplined musings on phenomena outside his expertise are ridiculed by researchers in the field. He promotes bigoted charlatans who spread hateful propaganda and flirt with Nazi apologism, anti-transgender rights, and denial of scholarship on race and gender. He has endorsed Christian supremacy over Islam, jeopardizing CFI’s hard-won respect in influential “interfaith” policy coalitions. Does this sound like the leading light of a charity-based employer? If you doubt any of what I say, I beg of you to seek the perspectives of other former employees. Ask as many as possible. Ask employees of other secular organizations who have interacted with CFI staff in enough depth to make meaningful comparisons of the work culture. Consulting with current CFI employees will not suffice, as staff members are contractually bound (and largely intimidated into) silence about the information you need to think critically about CFI, its accomplishments, and its work culture. CFI is not a gratifying place to work. I recommend against seeking employment there.
