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The rebel leader believed success was in hand: An autocrat deposed, tyranny on the run, one of America’s oldest cultural institutions rescued from disaster.
“We used classic guerrilla tactics,” said Twig Branch, the rebel leader, savoring his victory. He and a small band of allies had successfully ousted the president of Chautauqua Institution, a 151-year-old resort and cultural center that every summer attracts authors, musicians, playwrights and public intellectuals to its 750-acre lakeside campus in western New York. “We established a sophisticated spy network. We carefully designed a cellular network of provocateurs.”
It is an institution that could never be created today. Imagine a tent revival crossed with a TED Talk, but it started in 1874, and it’s also a gated community of Victorian cottages, Doric-columned churches, a 36-hole golf course, ballet studios and an amphitheater, all of it crowded onto a gently sloping hillside by a 17-mile-long lake.
This year the institution expects to attract about 100,000 visitors seeking cultural enrichment. People who attend the entire summer session will pay an entrance fee of $3,077 to spend nine weeks immersed in lectures, ballet, opera and symphony performances, plus pleasant lake breezes and streetscapes reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell painting. (Housing, food and all other expenses are not included.)
But underneath this genteel surface are bitter divisions that erupted just as the institution struggled to recover from the worst event ever to happen on its campus, when Salman Rushdie was nearly killed onstage by a knife-wielding jihadist in August 2022.
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