Something is going sideways at the de Young and Legion of Honor — and it has nothing to do with the art on the walls.

Behind the scenes at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a quiet conflict is brewing between the administration and the volunteer docent guides who have long served as the backbone of the museums' education programs. Changes to the education program, reportedly driven by leadership, have left many seasoned volunteers feeling sidelined, dismissed, and wondering why the institutions they've poured years into are suddenly treating them like a problem to be managed.

Let's be clear about what volunteer docents actually do: they provide free, knowledgeable, passionate guided tours that make world-class art accessible to the public. They're the reason a first-generation college student or a curious retiree can walk into the Legion of Honor and actually understand what they're looking at — without paying extra for the privilege.

So what's the administration's play here? The details remain murky, but the pattern is painfully familiar to anyone who's watched San Francisco's institutional bureaucracies operate. Leadership decides it knows better, rolls out changes with minimal input from the people actually doing the work, and then acts surprised when there's pushback.

Here's what frustrates us: these museums are publicly supported institutions. The Fine Arts Museums receive taxpayer dollars and sit on city-owned land. When administrators make decisions that drive away dedicated volunteers — people who literally donate their labor — that's not just bad management. It's a waste of public resources.

Volunteer docents save these museums hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Replacing that institutional knowledge and goodwill with whatever top-down "improvements" the admin has cooked up will almost certainly cost more and deliver less.

San Francisco has a nasty habit of letting its institutions prioritize administrative vision over community value. The Fine Arts Museums should be engaging their volunteers as partners, not adversaries. Because when you alienate the people who show up for free, you're not modernizing — you're just making things worse and more expensive.