Now that the initial hue and cry over Brandeis University’s decision to close their Rose Museum and sell its art is dying down to a dull, depressing hiss, consider the probable outcome should Brandeis refuse to change its mind. After settling a couple of lawsuits, the university will sell what it can of the Rose collection. Even if the sales are concluded at deflated prices, they’ll probably yield enough money for Brandeis to claw its way back to the top of its financial hole.

Here’s the important part. Say Brandeis recovers financially after the sales. Say it suffers no long-lasting impact from the affair — no loss of prestige, no drop in alumni donations or college application numbers, no shunning of the university by important scholars or visitors. Say a few years down the road nobody cares, or even remembers, that Brandeis’ fancy undergraduate studio building once housed an art museum with a stellar permanent art collection. What, then, is to prevent other colleges and universities, facing similar financial problems — or, when the economy is humming again, just wanting to cash in to float a new recreation center, basketball arena, or engineering building — from following suit?

The AAM (American Association of Museums) prohibits accredited museums — and the Rose was one of them — from deaccessioning any art except to purchase new works of art. But, obviously, it can’t do a thing if a college or university decides to carry off a Brandeis-style cultural demolition (what I’ve taken to calling “the Brandeis Maneuver”) that gets around this rule. College museum board members everywhere, listen up: There’s gold in them there museums, and your college administration and trustees will soon be smacking their lips.

A glance at a few choice college art collections — in small colleges, mind you — reveals some very good pickings. Start with Oberlin, which has a fine Cézanne, for example, or Smith College, which also has a choice Cézanne. Try Bates, with its collection of nearly a hundred Marsden Hartley drawings. Or take a look at the College of Wooster art museum, in Ohio, whose print collection includes a dandy Dürer and a lovely Winslow Homer.

My own university’s art museum — The Hofstra Museum of Art — is a modest institution compared to Oberlin’s or Smith’s museums, but we do happen to own a really prime George Grosz painting that would fetch a handsome price at auction or in a private sale. If my university starts to feel a little hampered in its ambitions by its modest endowment, some vice-president in charge of development might start daydreaming about what heights we could reach by closing our museum and selling just that one Grosz.

To philistines, the Brandeis Maneuver is a good thing. In a time when everything in a university needs to be prioritized according to its perceived utility, college museum collections top the list of expendable “luxuries.” If the only way to convert those collections into cash is to close the museums to free up the collections for sale, well, obviously, plenty of colleges and universities get along very well without museums. The Brandeis Maneuver has raised a huge question: Should a college or university consider its art museum’s very existence to be revocable should exigencies require a relatively speedy infusion of dollars?

If Brandeis gets away unscathed with its ugly maneuver (and, given the low value higher education now places on the likes of fine art, it probably will), college and university art museums will need to start looking over their shoulders for knives aimed at their backs. Ironically, of course, the better the quality of any given college art museum collection, the more vulnerable the museum housing it will be to murder for cash.

Perhaps college museum directors should think about ways for their museums to secede from their holding companies. (Sorry, I meant to say,“secede from their colleges.”) Then their efforts to preserve, protect, enhance and exhibit their collections would have a fighting chance of meaning something in the long run. At the very least, they should hire lawyers to draw up binding contracts preventing college trustees and presidents from using the Brandeis Maneuver to plunder their assets.

It’s time for me to end my jeremiads against Brandeis and turn to the business that apparently matters most to America — watching tonight’s Super Bowl.

(Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos by Flickr users freeparking and chispita 666)