Smithsonian Institution secretary to retire amid Trump attacks on museum independence

Lonnie Bunch III, the first Black secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is retiring at the end of 2025 after sustained political pressure from the Trump administration. Trump issued executive orders accusing the museum of divisive ideology, attempted to fire staff, and demanded content changes, forcing Bunch to navigate institutional defense while choosing which battles to fight. His departure raises questions about the independence of cultural institutions under political attack.

Teaching:
• When external pressure mounts, choosing which battles to fight is not weakness but strategic clarity—same principle applies when students face competing demands on their practice
• Bunch's line about winning versus feeling good maps directly to practice: sometimes you modify, sometimes you hold the line, but the goal is sustainable engagement not heroic posturing
• The stress of constant vigilance—checking your phone first thing—mirrors how students can lose practice to anxiety about doing it perfectly; both require boundaries to protect the thing you love
• Institutional independence under threat is a systems problem: when one node (executive power) tries to override feedback loops (board governance, curatorial expertise), the whole system destabilizes—like forcing asanas without listening to the body

Writing seeds:
• Essay on choosing your battles in practice: when to push through resistance versus when modification protects long-term capacity, using Bunch's 'my goal was to win' as frame
• Post for Shala Daily on waking up and checking your phone versus waking up and getting on your mat—what we attend to first shapes the day's nervous system baseline
• Piece on institutional memory and practice lineage: what happens when external pressure tries to rewrite the story of what a practice is for, whether museums or yoga traditions
• Short reflection on 'protecting the thing you love' requiring both red lines and letting things go—how practitioners navigate commercialization, appropriation, and their own egos around authenticity

Idea map:
• Systems literacy: Bunch navigating nested systems (board, executive branch, staff, public) shows how practice operates within systems of time, energy, culture, and personal history—you can't optimize one variable in isolation
• Attention economy: his comment about the phone is about where attention goes under stress—practice as training to notice when external demands colonize internal space
• Embodiment under pressure: choosing battles is somatic—knowing when your system can absorb a hit versus when it needs a boundary, same skill as distinguishing pain from sensation in asana
• Practice as method for ambiguity: Bunch's pragmatism (win don't just feel good) reflects practice as iterative response to conditions rather than ideological purity—both require tolerance for compromise without losing the thread

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/08/smithsonian-secretary-lonnie-bunch-retires