I suspect that most faculty members do not spend much time worrying about the superb museums that grace so many of our campuses. The exceptions are probably the art historians whose institutions support art museums, the ethnographers and archaeologists whose universities maintain anthropological-archaeological museums, and the small number of scientists who research in local repositories of natural-history specimens.
I can’t speak for the scientists, though I suspect that fewer and fewer natural scientists do their research on museum specimens these days, but I am pretty sure that relatively few anthropologists any longer base their ethnographic research on the sorts of cultural objects that constitute the major portion of collections of university anthropological museums. There are certainly more university art museums, and surely the art historians are still studying images — though not necessarily those in their local museums. Research is of course only one issue, but another is teaching. Even if faculty are not so frequently studying the collections of university museums, their collections are in theory still available both for course work and for other sorts of student learning experiences.
How good a job are both faculty and the museums themselves doing to promote and facilitate the use of university collections for pedagogical purposes? We ordinarily boast that these museums are central parts of the institutional teaching mission — but are they, really? These questions have taken on a new urgency in recent months, as the Great Recession puts universities under severe budgetary pressure. Can those of us who value museums honestly claim that they are performing an essential campus function, either for research or teaching? Since I direct a Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton, this is a question I have thought a lot about, and my impression is that it is a question asked with increasing frequency these days by university administrators.
I certainly spent most of yesterday thinking about the role of museums, since the Princeton Art Museum has just opened a magnificent exhibition, “Gifts from the Ancestors,” of ancient carved ivories from the Bering Straights. The show is beautifully curated, the objects on display are well described in an ambitious catalog and there is a fine Web site, so there is no doubt that the exhibition is an important scholarly exercise. Yesterday afternoon the curators also put on two interesting panels, composed of scholars and native Alaskans commenting on the materials and on the conditions of life that affect both the manufacture and collection of the materials — I participated on one panel, talking about the legal norms controlling collection and display of archaeological materials. There was a large audience, but it contained very few students (well, we were playing Columbia in football, losing 38-0) and even fewer faculty members (few if any of our faculty study Alaskan culture). But we have a new director for our museum, and I hope that both students and faculty will visit the exhibition, which was funded by NEH and private donations. I learned a lot from the panels and the show, and others will, too.
But of course there is a built in tension in any such exhibition. Is this art? Many of the objects had functional value, of course, so they were not merely decorative (though most were beautifully decorated). How do we assess both their functional and aesthetic value? These particular materials can be legally sold, given their original sites within the United States (and for other reasons). But will supporting a market in the objects provide incentives to disrupt existing sites and remove more of the objects from their native environments. Does a museum take sides in this controversy by mounting a magnificent display of the objects? Or does it more importantly draw helpful attention to the importance of the sites and the objects? Does the mounting of such a show at a university site need justification?
More fundamentally, does the university museum itself need justification? Or rejustification? Since we are mostly past the era of heroic museum collection (whether of art or of cultural material), does the university museum need a new rationale for the 21st century?
4 Responses to Why Do Universities Support Museums?
umbahli - October 5, 2009 at 1:03 am
The exhibition and panels you describe are a great example of thinking about a museum as an intellectual forum–too few university museums exist as an actual hub or public square. With fewer and fewer students spending extended time on campus it will only be more difficult to get them to engage. Perhaps museums should exist in close proximity to stadiums or at least have satellite sites? Not to mention that so many students have been socialized to expect noise, buttons and choices in the types of spaces they feel comfortable in. Of course, if they visit another city or country they will probably visit a museum! The museum grass is always greener on the other side! Museums are continually overlooked by the majority of university staff, faculty and students who never seem to notice the huge role they play in creating a sense of place for people who are not daily engaged on the campus. The possibilities for forum and interdisciplinary debate are endless for university museums, if you can ever get people to see them as more than beautiful spaces for administration receptions!
luigi - October 5, 2009 at 10:44 am
Professor Katz takes an insular view of museums. They may not be only for those in the groves of academe. They may also be a vehicle for sharing the fruits of academe with the public. Growing up in New Haven, I made countless trips to Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.
awmflib - October 5, 2009 at 12:21 pm
The questions appended to this thoughtful and relevant comment invite a synthetic answer: the rationale for maintaining museums does need to be constantly updated, as does the broad rationale for studying history and culture, yet there is a fundamental ground for museological activity–the direct experience of material objects in their presence to perceivers positioning tehmselves in a multi-dimensional space–that neither a photograph nor a cinematic representation nor an elaborate commentary can match or supersede. To appreciate the value of a full intuition of the object, one must be there with it. Museums make this “presentification” possible. Beyond that, the art and science of preservation and exhibition cultivated in museums play a quite major role in the conception and evolution of culture, historical research, and their institutions. Academia surely has to embrace this role. For research universities in particular, museums are indispensble as research sites that can bring both cultural breadth and historical depth to the interactions among the academic fields. Their urgent educational task is to figure out how to draw the academic public into insightful encounters that really cannot occur elsewhere. In sum, what justifies the work of campus museums coincides with the scholarly rationale for the university itself.
artmuser - October 5, 2009 at 10:48 pm
While I’m inclined to say that anything that draws focus to the continuing work of university-based museums is a good thing, it’s somehow also disheartening that such basic questions about the fundamental purpose of university museums should be asked. Do we hear such questions posed with legitimacy about the role and purposes of biochemistry laboratories? About economics departments? About law schools? I fear that the academy has, generally speaking, often fallen back on fundamental suspicions of its museums (its art museums in particular) as somehow being the luxury item, the “jewel in the crown” that reasserts the broader prestige of the university of which it is a part but which is seen as peripheral to the core of the academic enterprise. Suspicion about the visual (compared to data or the literary)? Maybe. Discomfort with the material aspects of the unique and valuable art object? Likely.Without doubt, university museums are as varied in their effectiveness as are any other part of the university. Some are already answering Professor Katz’s questions with aplomb. Some, such as the Nasher Museum at Duke University or the University of Michigan Museum of Art have become vibrant centers for university life as well as purveyors of scholarly exhibitions, becoming the marketplace for ideas in which different disciplines can be explored under one roof, propelled by unique and original works of art that foster just the kind of “insightful encounters” (with otherness, or with issues that bind cultures together) described by another commentator. The Hammer at UCLA has made itself, under its current director, one of the “hot” destinations for all of L.A., bringing city and university together in ways most other university units can only look at in wonderment. At Professor Katz’s own institution, the University’s museum continues to be deeply embedded in the core academic enterprise when senior faculty, students, and unique works of art come together in the uniquely Princeton format of the “precept”.Professor Katz concludes by asking “does the university museum need a new rationale for the 21st century?” That new rationale has been in active deployment in key centers of audacious programming (however defined) for some years now. But maybe that’s not as sexy as the raids on museums so well documented in the media (the Rose at Brandeis, the Maier at Randolph College, Fiske, etc.) Perhaps next time Professor Katz and other bloggers here could report more deeply on the very effective modeling already being done at our very best university museums, from Princeton to Los Angeles, from Ann Arbor to Durham–and beyond.