Assets? Well, Yes—of a Kind
Collections in College and University Art Museums and Galleries

James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director

When I became director of the Harvard University Art Museums just over a year ago, I felt I didn’t know enough about the foundation and development of academic museums to direct what for most of its one hundred years has been the leading such institution. For the next few months I therefore conducted a kind of lazy self-tutorial on the history, mission, and current state of university and college art museums and galleries.

But the laziness of my studies was interrupted last November by the sale of fourteen pre-twentieth-century works of art from the collection of Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. These had been deemed by the president and trustees of that university, and one supposes by the director of the museum (although one wonders if the art history faculty was consulted on this), as no longer appropriate to the museum, which was now going to focus exclusively on the art of the twentieth century.

Such deaccessioning is not in itself a questionable act by professional museum standards. The guidelines of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD)—as well as those of the American Association of Museums and the College Art Association—approve of deaccessioning, but only if the resulting proceeds are used to purchase additional works of art. The problem in the Brandeis case arose only when it was learned that the proceeds of the sale were to be used to offset the museum’s operating expenses, which included but were not limited to the costs of conservation and academic programs.

In a letter sent to those of us who opposed the Brandeis decision, President Samuel O. Thier argued that he was not dealing with a single "good"—that of the museum’s collection—but several goods, "including but not limited to the overall higher education enterprise of which the Rose Art Museum is but one element . . . and the fiduciary responsibility of the Trustees of the University to the entire University, including the Rose Art Museum." As a director of a university art museum, those remarks sent chills up my spine. For while I agreed with AAMD’s opposition to the sale on the grounds that it breeched our professional standards, I opposed it even more because President Thier made it quite clear that as far as he and his trustees were concerned, works of art could be sold for purposes entirely unrelated to the museum: for "the overall higher education enterprise of which the Rose Art Museum is but one element." In other words, in his and their minds, works of art are fungible assets that can be sold to benefit any of the university’s other "goods." When such works can fetch over $3 million as the Rose’s did, they represent a very tempting and easy way out of a difficult situation.

To be fair, after months of vigorous opposition from AAMD, President Thier agreed to put the proceeds of the sale in endowment and apportion them equally within the museum’s budget to education, conservation, and the acquisition of works of art. But his position was clear: works of art can be sold for whatever reason. This is what concerned me about the Brandeis decision, and what concerns me still about the vulnerability of all college and university art collections: if they are not regarded as vital to the curriculum, as catalysts for research and scholarship like library books and scientific equipment, they are little more than expendable assets capable of fetching high prices and providing instant relief to an administrator’s woes. No other part of the university is as vulnerable as its art collection, because no other part appreciates in monetary value so quickly while being so little appreciated for its real or potential pedagogical value.

The sale last November of the Brandeis paintings gave focus to my thinking about academic art museums and led me to the following reflections on the purpose and history of our collections.

The AAMD, which represents the leadership of approximately 140 of the largest art museums in North America, has a committee of directors of university and college art museums and galleries. We meet twice a year at the meetings of AAMD to discuss issues of common concern. For it is presumed that we have much in common; that we are all academic museums serving the faculty and students of our host institutions and, on our own terms, generating scholarship and instruction in the history of art. But even in AAMD, which offers membership to directors of art museums of only a certain size, thus ensuring greater similarities than differences among its members, we are very different one from another.1 And if we include all of the university and college art museums and galleries not represented in AAMD—and there are more not included than included—we are so different as to ultimately have very little in common at all.

Some of us, for example, are supported in full by the budgets of our colleges or universities, while others receive little or no such funding. Some of us report to presidents, some to provosts, some to deans, some to department chairs, and some even, I am told, to vice-presidents for student life, along with the heads of the food service, intramural athletics, and the chaplaincy! In other words, we are at least as different from each other as our host institutions are—be they research universities or liberal arts colleges, private or public, of a more local or national profile—and even when our host institutions are similar, we differ in size, resources, governance, and purpose. These differences should be set within the context of the history of art museums within this country.

It is a commonplace to remark on the recent and extraordinary rise in the number and size of art museums in the United States. By one count, between 1948 and 1987 alone more than 450 new art museums were built and more than 100 existing museums added over 10 million square feet of new space to their physical plants. More important, it has been argued that during this period the museum became the predominant American arts institution and that this was a peculiarly American phenomenon.2 There are many obvious reasons for this, including the postwar growth in the US economy and cultural confidence relative to war-torn Europe, and the consequent rise in the US art market and growth in foreign and domestic tourism. But there is another reason: the beginning of this period also saw the development of art history as a fully mature academic field of study in American universities.

Emerging as a distinct discipline in the second half of the 19th century, academic art history only fully established itself in this country after the second World War. The coincidence of German immigrant scholars coming to our most prominent universities and the maturing of our own faculties, which had been formed in the late 1920s and 1930s, provided the scholarly stimulus to attract the rapidly increasing number of students seeking specialized study in the fine arts.3 By the middle of the 1950s, many of these students were completing their graduate degrees and seeking employment in the ever-increasing number of art history departments across the country.

Andrew Ritchie’s 1966 study of the visual arts in higher education counted only 44 PhDs granted by the nine leading graduate programs during the 1930s, and 74 in just three years, 1960–62. Putting it another way, he wrote that it took more than 30 years to produce 453 PhDs in art history, while in 1962 there were 248 PhDs pending in the thirteen largest graduate programs. If these had all been granted and their recipients gone into teaching, they would have increased the number of PhDs in American art departments by 55% in that year alone. The increase in the production of PhDs during the early 1960s was thus six-fold over that of the entire 1930s.4

But this was not only true of art history: it was true of the humanities in general. Between 1958 and 1987, for example, the total number of doctorate degrees awarded in the humanities more than doubled, increasing from just under 1500 to just over 3000 with a peak of 4,796 in 1974. These produced about three-quarters of the humanities professors of the 1970s and 1980s, who in turn taught more students than ever before: in the early 1970s degrees in the humanities comprised about one-tenth of all degrees conferred.5

In other words, at just the time when the supply of students and demand for faculty in the humanities were at their height, the United States was experiencing an unprecedented growth in the number and size of art museums. And as this was true of art museums in general, it was true of university and college museums in particular.

In an article in Artnews in 1967, Edward Bryant called attention to a "boom in U.S. university museums," which he called "the most provocative development in the American museum world."6 And indeed there was a boom. Among the campus museums built or enlarged in the 1960s and early 1970s were those at Brandeis, Berkeley, NYU, Cornell, UCLA, and the Universities of Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And the pace only continued over the next two decades. A brief survey of the American Association of Museums’ official directories for 1965 and 1990 indicates that there were 114 college and university museums in 1965 and 265 in 1990 and that the latter figure comprised one-quarter of all listed art museums and galleries.

Bryant proposed a number of reasons for the dramatic increase in the number of academic museums in the 1960s, including the consensus—one supposes of the growing number of fine art faculties—"that the student of art history needs to be trained as a connoisseur of the physical uniqueness of a work of art, and [that] the budding artist must have access to first-rate creative performances." Such widespread recognition of the importance of works of art in the education of students was, he noted with no hint of irony, even shared by deans.7

Bryant suggested that the establishment and encouragement of academic museums was purposeful and positive. In an article in Art in America only four years later, John R. Spencer, then the director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin, was far more skeptical.8 He declared that "[u]niversity and college art museums are such ill-used and overlooked entities that one is tempted to consider them a product of chance," and that, once established, "[t]he overwhelming desire to build a collection at any cost makes the campus art museum a convenient dumping ground for unscrupulous collectors and overly ambitious college administrators." In the height of the boom in academic museums, Spencer called for an assessment of the phenomenon and, on a case-by-case basis, for a review and redefinition of the purpose of each museum or gallery. "A greater diversity," he concluded, "is needed in university art museums rather than homogeneity."

I find myself, now more than twenty years later and, together with my colleagues, facing a future not of seemingly unbridled growth as in the late ’60s and early ’70s, but of little or no growth and even retrenchment, reaching the same conclusion and feeling just as skeptical about academic art museums and our role as perceived by our host institutions. If we are a product of chance, we seem, in too many cases, to be governed by that principle and exploited by overly ambitious, or even desperate, college administrators.

The fiscal crisis in which many colleges and universities find themselves at present has caused many presidents and boards of trustees to look again at their art museums and galleries. For this reason it is worth reviewing the recently published AAMD statistical survey.

Of the 179 responding museums, 39 (or 22%) were affiliated with colleges or universities. These employed 688 full-time staff, or 4% of those employed by all respondents; occupied more than two million square feet of space (9%); were visited by more than three million people (7%); and had total operating expenses of over $62 million (5%). Most of the funds to meet operating expenses were provided by their host institutions, with 30 reporting investment income for these purposes of just over $8 million. And even this figure is skewed by one museum reporting over $3.5 million. Excluding this one anomalous museum, 29 academic museums shared $4.5 million in investment income to meet $55 million in operating expenses. This means that 90% of their operating expenses were met by other means, and in almost every case these means were their host institutions’ unrestricted accounts—a figure made all the more dramatic when one realizes that there are nine times as many academic museums not included in the survey as are included, and very few of these have any investment income at all.

In other words, and it will come as no surprise, art museums are small but expensive ventures for universities and colleges to undertake and maintain. In the case of those of us rich with collections of high quality, we are poor in terms of the restricted funds with which we can care for our collections or meet our operating expenses. And all of us, with or without collections, are vulnerable to the fiscal well-being of our host institutions. In today’s budgetary climate, more and more attention is being paid to academic museums, not in order to celebrate our many pedagogical contributions but to see how our programs might be cut, our costs reduced, and parts of our collections sold.

The only way to answer the budgetary queries of our host institutions in times like these is to proclaim and adhere to our academic mission and to request from our presidents, provosts, deans, or department chairs clear statements as to their expectations for us, our collections, and our programs. Any misunderstandings between museum directors and our administrative superiors on these matters will only cause mutual frustration. In the end, administrative judgment of our museums’ value can only be based on our contributions to the curricula of our host institutions.

While Bryant wrote of the growing consensus among fine arts faculties in the 1960s that "the student of art history needs to be trained as a connoisseur of the physical uniqueness of a work of art"—and thus a consensus for the value of campus art collections—it should be noted the existence of art collections on campuses preceded the establishment of art history departments and that such collections were not initially conceived as comprising primary source material for specific and disciplinary research. Rather, they were acquired for more general and diverse reasons, including the encouragement of taste and the refinement of culture among students, and for providing documentary evidence of past civilizations for the enlightenment of students studying elsewhere in the curriculum. This is important: it shows that at their origin campus art collections were seen as multi-disciplinary resources and valued for their many and diverse contributions to the curriculum. Something of the same can be said of art collections today.

The recent challenge to traditional disciplinary studies has opened campus art collections to a wider participation in the curriculum. Works of art are of interest not only to art historians or artists, but to students and faculty of history, comparative literature, women’s studies, Afro-American studies, and anthropology, to name but a few of the academic departments exhibiting an increased interest in the visual arts. Indeed, it could be argued that just when collections are coming under scrutiny from campus administrators, they are becoming more important to the scholarly and curricular life of faculty and students.

Seeing the campus art museum as the province of the art history department is a phenomenon only of the 20th century: it had to wait for the establishment of the art history department itself. An early step in this development was the appointment by Harvard in 1874 of Charles Eliot Norton as Lecturer on the History of Fine Arts as Concerned with Literature. Holding the nation’s first professorship in art history, Norton was extremely influential as a teacher and, despite the fact that he never illustrated his lectures, inspired a whole generation of Harvard students in their studies of art history.9 By the time the Fogg Art Museum was founded in 1895, just three years before Norton retired, Harvard had a fully established curriculum in the study of art and a burgeoning Department of Fine Arts.

The founding mission of the Fogg was to house the entire disciplinary apparatus of art history within its walls. This included a library, classrooms, museum and faculty offices, and storage rooms and exhibitions spaces for its collections. Thirty-five years later the Fogg moved to a much larger (and its present) building and added technical and conservation laboratories. With these the Fogg was in a position, as one scholar recently put it, to establish "patterns for the formatting of art historical information, teaching, and study that have been canonical in America down to the present, and that have been replicated through various material and technological transformations by scores of academic departments throughout the world." At the core of what became known as "the Fogg method" was the hands-on experience of the technical processes of artistic production. This made the museum a kind of laboratory for the study of the material circumstances of artistic product ion. This of course required the presence of original works of art and the building up of collections. And it secured an alliance between the academic museum and the art history faculty, the pedagogical functions of which were assumed to be mutually enhancing.10

By the early 20th century, this was also true at Bowdoin, Princeton, Yale, Smith, Vassar, and Oberlin, all of which have substantial art collections. But it was also true of certain state universities in the midwest. The fine arts collection at the University of Michigan, for example, was established a century before the founding of the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 1946. In 1855, with appropriations from the Regents, a classics professor purchased photographs, engravings, architectural models, and copies of ancient sculpture to illustrate his lectures. These were followed by purchases of medals, gems, and medallions of historic personages. Eventually paintings and sculpture were added and the collections were housed and displayed in a university library. Two large bequests in the early twentieth century forced the collection into new quarters in Alumni Memorial Hall which also included the Fine Arts Department, and a member of that department was given charge of the collection. Soon the collection was divided and a Museum of Classical Archaeology established. In 1945, the university Regents established the Museum of Art "for the collection, conservation, study, and exhibition of works of art," to be directed by a member of the staff of the Department of Fine Arts or the College of Architecture and Design. Over the next twenty-five years, the museum would be guided on a sure course of cooperation with the art history department so that now, along with the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, it is a model academic museum serving well its large and complex university constituency.11

With the alliance of museums and art history departments, it stands to reason that both would have a common history and pattern of geographical distribution.12 During the period 1930–1962, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the Institute of Fine Arts, and Princeton accounted for 73% of all art history PhDs in the nation and 75% in 1962 alone. At the same time, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale accounted for almost 70% of the collections in the twenty-four largest academic museums. Ten years later, these institutions’ share of the PhD market was down to 44.2%, with ten midwestern universities accounting for 21% and three California universities accounting for 9.2%.13 We do not have correlative figures for campus art collections, but we know that the 1960s saw a boom in the construction of academic museums and galleries and that these were most often built in the west and midwest; those at the University of Nebraska, Notre Dame, Berkeley, and UCLA, being the most notable. But did new or larger buildings necessarily mean larger or more important collections, or, in any case, a larger and more important share of the nation’s combined campus museum collections? I would think yes, perhaps a larger share, but not a more important one. For the greatest growth in academic museums occurred just when it was becoming most difficult to make significant and important acquisitions.

In his 1966 study, Ritchie cited acquisitions as the major problem of campus museums. Very few museums had more than meager acquisition funds and all depended very heavily on gifts from alumni. Further, as experienced and discriminating collectors tended to be grouped in the northeast and were more often than not already associated with the older, better-established academic museums, the collections-rich museums at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton got richer relative to the more recently established museums of the west and midwest. Ritchie proposed three correctives for the impoverished, newly-established collection: "(1) more acquisition funds; (2) an absolute insistence upon exhibiting only works of quality, however few, and resisting to the best of one’s ability all offers of inferior gifts, except for sale or exchange; and (3) with limited means, resisting the temptation to buy poor works by big names or studio leavings of fashionable artists." And while suggesting various ways to acquire useful collections with limited funds, he concluded that "[t]he fact remains, however (and this cannot be emphasized too strongly), that most academic museums, and particularly the recent ones, are in great need of additional purchase funds and these must soon be forthcoming from public and private sources if the new museums are to be anything more than expensive architectural ornaments."

It is understandable that the 1960s boom in campus museums brought with it a demand for collections; after all, their purpose was to teach from the original work of art. But could so many recently established museums meet this demand? Could they build even adequate collections? And if they couldn’t, should they settle for less? Can poor or inadequately cared-for collections provide sufficient intellectual stimulus for learning or scholarship, which after all is their stated purpose? Almost never. If it is the role of the academic museum to insist on the value of teaching from original works of art, that role is subverted by any attempt to teach from works of mediocre quality or in poor condition. Any original work of art is no substitute for a great or even good one. Students can learn infinitely more—and certainly be more inspired by—a great work in reproduction than a poor work in the flesh; that has to be said.

So, in the 1960s and 1970s—let alone in the 1990s—was it possible to build up collections worthy of their stated pedagogical value? Only in limited or specialized ways: in the areas of contemporary art or works of art on paper, perhaps. Old Master painting collections were and are still no longer to be had, and the proscriptions on collecting antiquities and Asian art rightly make it difficult to amass significant collections of those materials. Should college and university museums without rich and varied collections have as one of their stated purposes to build such collections? Or should they function as kunsthallen, galleries without collections which use their resources to organize and engage students and faculty in the preparation of temporary exhibitions, support current research in the history of art, and bring to campus works of art of higher quality and greater importance than is possible for them to acquire?

Obviously, the two kinds of institutions are not mutually exclusive. Museums with collections should also organize exhibitions and promote research. And galleries with no collections, or museums with small and less important collections, can begin to build vital teaching collections, but not on the model of the older, more substantially endowed museums. Academic museums wishing to build collections should not try to imitate the older collections if this forces them to acquire lesser works and teach either from poor examples or from what John Spencer called equivalents: "Cross stands for Seurat, Giampetrino for Leonardo, a Rembrandt etching for a Rembrandt painting." While this sounds terribly elitist and old-fashioned today, it is nevertheless true.

Teaching museums, should they wish to build collections—and there is still, in my mind, a very good argument against doing so and for spending their limited resources instead on exhibitions and publications—should seek new areas in which to collect and ought to specialize in them in order to provide a depth of resources for their students and faculties. The current reevaluation of the canon of art history—and the demonstrated interest of many humanities and social science departments in teaching from and studying works of art—makes this a particularly privileged time in which to seek new and different kinds of collections. In order not to fuel the illicit trade in protected cultural properties, these almost certainly will be collections of contemporary art. But still, contemporary visual culture is a very strong and growing area of interest among our faculty and students and invites the consideration of art produced not only in all media, but by people from all nations. The remaining resources can then be used to organize or bring exhibitions of mate-rials one cannot collect but which are vigorously taught, like Korean or Chinese ceramics and Old Master prints and drawings. This would maximize resources and contribute to the structuring of a sound and balanced museum program sensitive to the needs of students and faculty. Of course, the reverse is true of museums with more conventional holdings: we need to allocate sufficient resources to organize and bring exhibitions of works of art quite different from those in our collections.

Consistent in my discussion of academic museums has been the understanding that we are vital to the curricular and scholarly enterprise of our host institutions and that we are so because we insist that the work of art is the lodestar of art historical study. Of course not all of our faculty colleagues agree with this position. Recent trends in art history have emphasized more theoretical or self-critical and historiographical issues that do not require first-hand experience of original works of art. Such trends are concerned more with interpretations of interpretation itself and the writing about the writing of art history. Nevertheless, the work of art as a subject of study will always be important to art historical inquiry. For we exist to insist on the role of the object in the study of art and by this fact alone contribute much to the depth of—and debate within—art historical curricula, not to mention those of the other disciplines which are showing greater and greater interest in teaching and learning from original works of art.

In a remarkable little book published by the American Association of Museums in 1942, College and University Museums: A Message for College and University Presidents, Laurence Vail Coleman wrote that "[f]inances shape the museum and show pretty clearly what the administration wants to have done in art."14 He then sketched out what he thought an academic museum might cost (the book was like a primer for ambitious college presidents on the eve of the boom in campus museums). He noted that college art museums generally receive up to $25,000 a year in support; and university art museums up to at least $150,000 a year. Acquisitions and exhibitions are additional expenses: $1000 should make possible a modest loan exhibition program, but he advised that really $5000 is needed; if more than $5000 is available, then he suggested that some of the larger amount should go toward acquisitions; and if there is $10,000, he believed the collection ought to be developed systematically. These, he warned, are just rough ideas of the costs associated with campus museums. But he was certain about one thing: the proceeds from any deaccessioning should, contrary to common practice, be returned to the art museum. "If an institution came by books with an estate it would turn them over to the library; and if the books were sold the proceeds would be credited—or ought to be credited—to the library’s purchase fund. But art collections are commonly sold like real estate, and the proceeds taken for general purposes without the art museum having as much as a smell."

That was fifty years ago and, as the words of President Thier of Brandeis tell us, things have hardly changed. College and university art museums and galleries remain as vulnerable as ever to the financial pressures of our host institutions. And it is one of the most unfortunate facts of the 1960s boom in campus museums that they were often built hurriedly and without foresight. Now thirty years later they are under- or even un-endowed, and in many cases are left to limp along on the margins of campus life. As John Spencer wrote in 1971, "Chance may have midwifed these museums and chance may have determined their number, but chance will not extricate them from the problems they now face."

The problems they faced then are the problems we face now. Only we face ours in a time of retrenchment and downsizing, rather than growth and expansion. What principles should guide the cost-cutting measures most of us are facing? Only those that derive from a clear understanding of the role and purpose of art museums on campuses. These would make it clear that our collections are not for sale, and that our exhibitions and scholarly publications are not tangential to the enterprise of our host institutions.

If we are not to be "expensive architectural ornaments," as Andrew Ritchie warned we might, we deserve sufficient and consistent support in both word and deed. Unfortunately, while this is clearly understood and even loudly championed by the leaders of some of our institutions, especially the president of my own, it is not sufficiently understood by others. Those who do not understand this still look upon their museums and galleries as operational liabilities rich in fungible assets. This should not be the case. Now, more than one hundred years after the founding of the earliest college and university art museums, we are forced yet again to proclaim: yes our collections are assets, but assets of a very specific, pedagogical kind. They are not just one "good" among many, but are vital components of the teaching and scholarly resources that comprise the very heart of the university or college itself. That, and nothing less.

James Cuno is the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums.

NOTES

1. The published criteria of membership in AAMD includes the definition of an appropriate-sized museum as having "a professional staff and annual operating budget equivalent to or exceeding an amount determined from time to time by the Trustees, initially established at $1.4 million." back

2. Neil Rudenstine in Martin Feldstein, The Economics of Art Museums, Chicago, 1991, 79. back

3. See Erwin Panofsky, "Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European," in his Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York, 1955, 321–46. back

4. Andrew C. Ritchie, The Visual Arts in Higher Education, a study prepared for the College Art Association of America under a grant from the Ford Foundation, 1966, 17. back

5. William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa, Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences, Princeton, 1989, 53–5 and 98–101. Prospects for the study of the humanities is of great interest to college and university art museums. More and more we will be engaging students and faculty from various humanities departments and not only art history, which was the case in the past. An early experiment in the humanities’ interest in the campus art museum was a 1977 NEH Institute at the University of Kansas, "The Humanist in the Museum;" see, Marilyn Stokstad, et. al., Museums, Humanities and Educated Eyes, Lawrence, Kan., 1982. back

6. Edward Bryant, "The Boom in U.S. University Museums," Artnews, September 1967, 30–47, 73–5. back

7. At the time, Bryant was head of the School of Fine Arts and the Art Gallery at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. back

8. Originally published in Art in America, the article was later republished in Brian O’Doherty, ed., Museums in Crisis, New York, 1972, 131–43. back

9. Collegiate Collections, 1776–1876, exh. cat., Mount Holyoke College, 1976, and George H. Chase, "The Fine Arts, 1874–1929," in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., The Development of Harvard since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929, Cambridge, 1930, 130–45. back

10. Donald Preziosi. "The Question of Art History," Critical Inquiry, Winter 1992, 364–5. back

11. This history is taken from an excellent account of the founding of the University of Michigan Museum of Art in its Illustrated Catalogue of European and American Painting and Sculpture, compiled by Hilarie Faberman and Karen Wight. back

12. Blanche Carlton Sloan and Bruce R. Swinburne, Campus Art Museums and Galleries, Carbondale, Ill., 1981, 21–3. back

13. Barbara Y. Newsom and Adele Z. Silver, eds. The Art Museum as Educator, Berkeley, 1978, 513 and 543 n.2. back

14. Laurence Vail Coleman, College and University Museums: A Message for College and University Presidents, Washington, D.C., 1942, 35. back