"I wish I had left sooner." - Associate Director NAFSA Employee Review

Like everyone who leaves this organization, I quickly found myself saying "I wish I had left sooner." There is a total absence of learning at NAFSA. They simply repeat ineffectual old practices. Any changes are cosmetic and a rare improvement is fortuitous, or short-lived. The focus on membership and actually supporting the people who the org is supposed to represent is dwindling, especially (and tragically) in a really rough year for higher ed. Membership and prices continue to rise while less is being offered to support the field. Among the senior staff, including senior directors, there is a culture of betrayal and gaslighting. Bully-behavior is tolerated because nobody does anything about it. The first time it happened to me, I was aghast at how unprofessional some of the staff conducted themselves, and when I brought my shock to my colleagues and they said, "He always gets away with it." with a shrug of the shoulders. This happened again and again because it’s tolerated. It becomes exhausting and infuriating and people can only take so much. There is an uneven application of policy between staff: teleworking, pay disparities between people who do the same jobs, and the annual review procedures being a total joke. The leadership team rarely gives insight into how policies work - when pressed, it's considered a challenge and you'll go through cycles of useless meetings with a lot of raised eyebrows. People are promoted into positions that are already ineffectual or unwanted. The people in the higher level positions either don't know what they are doing or they don't understand the work their staff is performing, so they clog up the flow and pace of any actual work getting done, which adds to the choked-up, slow bureaucratic structure of the entire org. Or, worse, the project stalls out completely and it becomes a foggy memory. It's common for staff to say "Oh, we did something like this years ago, and I don't know what happened to it?" Incredibly uneven distribution of work among staff; Some staff have a workload fit for 2 people and others are asking for work or unclear on what their role is.