Defining the Mission of the Academic Art Museum

Once again it is time to consider the mission of the academic art museum, the term I will use henceforth in reference to art museums and galleries on college and university campuses—galleries and museums which to a greater or lesser extent attend to the needs and interests of a general, non-university public, but which all acknowledge as their primary constituencies the faculty and students of the academic institutions of which they are a part. 1

Not since the 1960s has there been so much time, money, and space dedicated to the academic art museum. 2 During the past few months and upcoming weeks, new or renovated and expanded art museums have or will open at the University of Minnesota, Emory and Pennsylvania State Universities, and Vassar, Wellesley, and Boston Colleges. The Ackland Museum of Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, and the art museums at Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Mount Holyoke College will be searching for new directors. And the Yale University Art Gallery and the Harvard University Art Museums (and no doubt others) will be deeply engaged in multimillion-dollar capital campaigns to take them safely into the twenty-first century.

We at the Harvard University Art Museums spent the greater part of the summer overseeing the construction of a consolidated curatorial center for the Fogg Art Museum’s collections of prints, drawings, and photographs. The Agnes Mongan Center, a 7,000-square-foot project costing just over $3 million, will provide for 100 percent growth of these collections. In addition, we have been planning for a $5 million renovation and expansion of our conservation center, engaging engineers and architects in a climate control feasibility study of the Fogg (a project that might cost as much as $20 million), renovating art storage, moving the museum shop, and planning for a new seminar room in which works of art can play a central role in the day-to-day teaching that we and our faculty colleagues do. We have also opened our galleries on Mondays so that we are now open seven days a week, and have recently hired an assistant curator of photographs and an associate curator of American art.

This level of activity would suggest that like many of our sister institutions, including those mentioned above, we at Harvard do not consider ourselves in a posture of retrenchment. On the contrary, we view the 1990s as a decade promising real and significant growth, contradicting the prognostications of decline so often heard with regard to the American art museum and the American university. How is this possible? How can we—and our sister academic art museums—be experiencing higher levels of staff morale and increased membership in friends and patrons groups, while engaging more and more diverse academic departments in the development and execution of our curatorial and curricular programs, when so many of our colleagues in municipal and community art museums are laying off staff in great numbers, closing two and sometimes three days a week, cutting back on or suspending building projects, and canceling exhibitions? How can we explain our obvious success?

We can, I am convinced, because we have a sure sense of mission as a particular kind of art museum and know well who our public is and how to go about engaging it with pride and confidence. Too many of our community and municipal art museums appear confused about their mission today, although each one will say it is to acquire, preserve, and interpret works of art of the highest quality. Too many are emphasizing the marketability of their collections and curatorial initiatives, either by organizing exhibitions so as to maximize attendance and sell merchandise in increasingly large and luxurious museum shops, or through mounting exhibitions not for their real or potential contributions to scholarship but because they can be "sold" to other venues—including, increasingly, far distant ones with greater and greater risk to the safety of their collections. Equally, too many art museums are responding frantically to political pressures for increased access, appearing defensive and reactionary and not at all confident in the greatness that has marked their many decades of service to culture and scholarship. More to the point: these developments have almost never resulted from a well-reasoned change of mission. Rather, they usually seem to precede—indeed, even to cause—a recasting of mission, a recasting that never admits to the tensions inherent in modifying a long-term past mission because of short-term present needs.

We at Harvard, on the other hand, have recently made significant structural, budgetary, and programmatic changes in concert with a well-conceived and much-discussed mission statement. These changes, it must be emphasized, have not been easy, nor painless. Since 1991 we have reduced administrative staff by 10 percent for an annual savings of over $300,000, and have increased fund-raising by more than 100 percent, improving our fund-raising efficiency from $31 to $95 raised for every $1 spent in development. We have also incurred additional costs by opening on Mondays and rededicating our Photographic Services Department and Conservation Center to the service of our curators, faculty, and students (the Conservation Center especially had been forced in the past ten years to function as an income-producing service department at the expense of our collections and service to teaching and scholarship). These three changes may cost us as much as $250,000 annually, but we are committed to making them work. We are not in a defensive position, reacting to situations out of our control. We are, to a great extent, the authors of our own success. And, as we turn more and more to individuals and foundations committed to supporting academic art museums and their role in higher education, we can do so with confidence in our mission and with evidence of a lean administration ever more efficient in raising money.

This success, I hasten to say, is not my doing. Four years ago, in preparation for hiring a new director, Derek Bok, then president of Harvard, wrote a long and detailed statement which among other things defined our mission as one of primary responsibility to students and faculty at Harvard and elsewhere throughout the academy and museum profession. This mission statement was the result of many conversations between President Bok and the staff of the Art Museums, the faculty of the Fine Arts Department, and members of our Visiting Committee, who, as academic and museum professionals and experienced museum trustees, gather annually to assess our programmatic progress. It is a statement I agree with entirely. And I and my colleagues refer to it frequently when shaping our current and future course of action.

Defining its mission broadly and in detail, engaging its constituents in the process, is the first step every museum should take. And when, as in the case of academic art museums, one’s mission is necessarily bound to that of the larger academic institution of which one is a part, this step and its timing—preceding, rather than succeeding from, new initiatives—is all the more crucial.

I say this because I recently visited two colleges at the invitation of their presidents and talked with them about their visions for their art museums and their concerns about the costs of such entities at a time of budgetary constraints. When many of our universities and colleges are cutting faculty and eliminating academic departments and programs, we must remember that we are especially vulnerable unless we can prove that we are central to the heart of the academic enterprise. Indeed, the implicit criteria used by the faculty and administration of Columbia University in deciding recently to close their entire School of Library Science provide us with an excellent guide for institutional self-examination in this regard.

Jonathan R. Cole, Columbia’s provost, articulated the framework used in closing the School, which included these elements: "1) an effort to establish a balance between core activities of the University and those that are peripheral (if enriching) activities; 2) academic priorities that juxtaposed the cost of maintaining and enhancing a preeminent school against the resources required for higher priority arts and sciences needs and the necessity to invest in other new programs; 3) an evaluation of whether the School was critical to the educational and research missions of other schools of the University; 4) the opportunity costs associated with over 25,000 square feet of space (in a space-poor campus) that might otherwise be used for renovation and expansion of Columbia’s main library; 5) an evaluation of whether the School would move decisively into information science, a goal that had been set five years earlier; 6) the possibility of students interested in traditional forms of library service obtaining a quality education in the discipline at other universities in the nation; and 7) the impact on the University’s larger reputation of closing a school in an area in which we had been pioneers."3 Substitute a museum’s name for the word "School" in that list of criteria and see how it would fare in such a review. On what terms can we as academic art museums defend our continuing existence when, as in the case of Columbia, our college or university’s operating budget doubles every ten years and new sources of revenue are getting harder and harder to find?

The answer can only be that we contribute significantly to the teaching of students and to the discovery of new knowledge. Any other answer might be one dean’s, provost’s, or president’s justification for our existence, but it could just as easily not be the answer for the next.4 At a time when university administrators are readily acknowledging that their institutions cannot afford excellence in all areas of knowledge and that they will have to grow through substitution or make difficult choices between competing goods, we can no longer take for granted even the existence of our museums and galleries. While it may not be certain that we will survive far into the future by successfully executing our academic mission, it is almost surely the case that we will not survive, at least in our current form, if we fail to do so. We must always remember that the larger academic institutions of which we are a part are constantly engaged, as Columbia was with regard to an examination of its School of Library Science, in "an effort to establish a balance between core activities of the University and those that are peripheral (if enriching) activities." In what relation are we and our activities to the core and peripheral activities of our college or university? That’s the question we must never forget to ask ourselves.5

Of course, I realize the answer to the last question is not the same for all of us. We are quite diverse one from another. Some of us report to presidents, some to provosts or deans, some even to department chairs. In addition, we may be part of research universities, teaching universities, or liberal arts colleges. We may or may not have significant collections, or any collections at all. And we may be situated in major metropolitan centers rich in art museums or located elsewhere where ipso facto we are at once academic and regional art museums, resources for our students and faculty colleagues and also for the residents of our towns and neighboring communities. But however different we are, it is undeniable that we are all academic art museums, and to a greater or lesser extent dependent on and subject to the fiscal well-being of the university or college of which we are a part.

In this regard, how many of us really think about what it means to be an academic art museum, and how we differ from municipal art museums? Do our curators really conceive of their jobs differently from their colleagues in other kinds of museums? When we advertise our open curatorial positions do we emphasize that candidates must be committed to an academic culture, willing to engage students and faculty colleagues in curricular issues, as sophisticated in the affairs of the academy as in those of the museum profession, passionate both about teaching and about keeping and enhancing collections, experienced in devising exhibitions of a kind distinct from those organized in municipal art museums, knowledgeable about the history and nature both of higher education and of art museums? Do we and our curators want more than anything else to be academic directors and curators? Are we clear about and confident in our special professional identities?

And what about our colleagues in municipal art museums? Do they regard us as distinct from themselves, offering a different kind of experience to the museum-going public? Do they look to us to train the directors, curators, and museum educators of the next generation, or to experiment with exhibition ideas and produce new knowledge? Do they acknowledge that we play a crucial role in the early development of the collectors and patrons who will later sustain many of their programs? Do they value our unique position as a bridge between the academic and museum worlds, able to serve each as a catalyst in terms of the other? Do they support us in this regard? Do we meet periodically to discuss these issues? And would we participate as equals if we did?

In the same respect, how are we regarded on campus? As peers of the faculty or in service to them? Are we rewarded for our teaching, whether it be of a formal, curricular kind or a more informal, extracurricular kind? Are our publications considered equal to those of the faculty? Are we allowed to participate in the governance of our host institutions to the same extent as our faculty colleagues? Are we given tenure and do we receive sabbaticals? Or are we considered a kind of bizarre mixture of administrator, development officer, and librarian—the latter also considered of lower status than faculty?6

Are we at the center or on the periphery of the life of the academy, or indeed of that of the museum profession? Where do we stand? Neither fully in the one nor the other, but in both and with lesser status in each? These are difficult questions, I realize. And they will be answered differently by each of us because some of us are collections-rich museums on the campuses of research universities and some of us collections-poor museums, or indeed kunsthallen, on the campuses of state teaching universities and liberal arts colleges (and, of course, collections-rich museums at liberal arts colleges and kunsthallen at research universities). How then do we define our individual missions?

Let me suggest that we should do so first as academic art museums distinct from nonacademic art museums. Then, we should do so in terms of the nature of the larger academic institutions of which we are a part. We who are part of research universities, for example, should pursue missions different from those of us who are not. Let me offer an example of how we at Harvard interpret our special responsibilities in this regard.

Two years ago we received a three-year grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to explore new possibilities for the study and curatorship of American art. This permitted us to hire an associate curator of American art and to bring to campus two visiting senior specialists for a term each, and a number of other specialists for shorter periods of time, to engage us, the curator, and our faculty and students in a sophisticated dialogue about American art. We recognized that we could not simply consider American art as that which was produced by European settlers and their descendants on this continent between, say, 1660 and 1940. American art was never that simple and is clearly more complicated now. We wanted to explore what it would mean to think of—and, even more, to curate—American art as that which derives from and is deeply rooted in the peculiar cultural circumstances of North America, circumstances which result from a continuing negotiation between indigenous and immigrant cultures.

We wanted to define American art above all as a dynamic category of cultural expression. To that end, we put together a committee of our curators and faculty colleagues from the Departments of Fine Arts, English and American Literatures and Languages, Anthropology, and History, and the programs of Afro-American Studies and American Civilization. The committee met to discuss the terms under which we were to proceed, and then we sought from each of the above-mentioned departments the names of potential visiting faculty-curators. We will soon meet to decide on two candidates for these visitorships, and then we will try to bring them to campus. Their role will be to teach seminars and to work with all of us—curators and faculty alike—to help us define a program for American art at the Fogg Art Museum. At the end of three years, we hope to be able to offer a new model for the study and curatorship of American art, one that may prove useful to our museum colleagues within and without the academy.

This we think is the special responsibility of the research university academic art museum: we should not only be keeping and presenting our collections, but should also be holding the conventions of curatorship up to close and rigorous scrutiny, examining the nature of our professional practice and of the institution of the museum itself. Now, of course at Harvard we are in a good position to do this. We have resources that few other museums do, both in terms of the Museum proper and of the University as a whole. And that’s my point. Because of those resources we should assume a special role within our profession and academic discipline. That is our mission.

It is also part of our mission to educate the next generation of museum directors and curators and to influence the education of future college and university teachers. Harvard has had a long tradition of doing this, in a formal way through the so-called museum courses of Paul Sachs and John Coolidge, and in an informal way by engaging students as interns, fellows, and employees in the experience of all aspects of curatorship and, to a lesser extent, museum administration. Notice that I was careful not to say "train" curators and directors. I do not believe it is our role to offer preprofessional programs. For the most part, that is not the purpose of research universities. Museum degree or certificate programs are more rightly suited to the mission of teaching universities, and that is where one generally finds such programs. We at research institutions should be engaged instead in a sophisticated examination both of the fundamentals of curatorial practice—from connoisseurship to scholarship of all kinds and of all periods—and of the institution itself, its history, current structure, and sociocultural ambitions, as well as its future course.

In distinguishing between the three kinds of academic art museums, I have oversimplified fairly complicated matters. But it is in the nature of mission statements to be simple. There-fore, let me propose a brief mission statement for academic art museums:

Like all art museums, the mission of academic art museums is to acquire, preserve, interpret, and exhibit works of art for the education and enjoyment of their public. Unlike other art museums, however, academic art museums should consider the students and faculty of their college or university as their primary public and should dedicate their intellectual and material resources accordingly. Art museums on the campuses of research universities, teaching universities, and liberal arts colleges will do this differently, in keeping with the mission of the larger academic institutions of which they are a part. But this does not mean that academic art museums will ignore the general public. To the extent that a museum’s college or university supports its role in the larger community—and this will generally depend on the richness or paucity of other museums within the community—the academic art museum will seek to engage the general public. It will do so, however, always on the terms that distinguish an academic art museum from an art museum of another kind, terms which are defined by the role of the academic art museum within the intellectual culture of the academy.

By this statement I do not mean to suggest that academic art museums can exist and pursue their mission in relative isolation from the general public, for of course they—we—cannot. However much we focus on the academic perspective in pursuit of our special museological mission, we are always engaging a more general public. And, of course, the academic perspective itself is inherently Janus-like: at once backward- and forward- looking, separate from and part of the world it influences and is influenced by.

Nannerl O. Keohane, currently president of Duke University but for many years president of Wellesley College, writes passionately of this peculiar quality of academic life. "Universities … have a distinctive timelessness that provides a generous horizon for our work," she admits. "We are conscious of our participation in a long heritage of institutions demonstrably similar to ours, reaching back even beyond the medieval European university to the schools and academies of ancient times. This sense of history is made palpable in our traditions and ceremonies, our academic processions, colorful regalia, and distinctive feast days—commencements, convocations, and inaugurations. There is a variant of apostolic succession here that gives an assurance of rootedness and continuity even in troubled times"7—a rootedness, it has to be said, only in an imaginary place of temporal and spatial isolation.

President Keohane does not mean to deny the university’s obligation to contribute to the betterment of the world and its future. Indeed, in her own definition of a modern research university, she describes "a company of scholars engaged in discovering and sharing knowledge, with a responsibility to see that such knowledge is used to improve the human condition."8 The discovery and sharing of new knowledge occurs both within the university and in both directions between the university and the "outside world," just as the improvement of the human condition occurs within the classroom and in the frequent intercourse between the academy and government, industry, and business. The university and the world are not mutually exclusive, however different they are and however much their differences cause tensions to arise within the university itself. As President Keohane points out, "These tensions between parochial and cosmopolitan affiliations, between rootedness in the past and restlessness about the future, and between the love of learning for its own sake and investment in making the world a better place are close to the heart of the university. However we define our mission, such tensions must be acknowledged if we are to have any hope of presenting our strengths and our character faithfully to the world."9

The same can be said of academic art museums: we do have an obligation to—indeed, we can never fully isolate our-selves from—the "outside world." But how do we fulfill that obligation? President Keohane’s words are important here: "presenting our strengths and our character faithfully to the world." Like the college or university of which we are a part, our relation to the world must be cast in terms of what we and we alone can bring to it. Although of it, we are not like the world. Our special circumstances—part of a college or university campus—require of us a special response to the world, a response in which differences of opinion are taken seriously and given their due free of the pressures that sometimes limit the free and creative exchange of differing ideas in the world beyond the academy.

Gerald Graff, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, has turned a phrase I find useful in this regard. In his recent book, Beyond the Culture Wars, he encourages us to "teach the conflicts," and writes: "Teaching the conflicts has nothing to do with relativism or denying the existence of truth. The best way to make relativists of students is to expose them to an endless series of different positions which are not debated before their eyes. Acknowledging that culture is a debate rather than a monologue does not prevent us from energetically fighting for the truth of our convictions. On the contrary, when truth is disputed, we can seek it only by entering the debate—as Socrates knew when he taught the conflicts two millennia ago."10

"Teaching the conflicts" takes time—time to consider just what the conflicts are, on what they are based, how they are presented, and what is at stake. This is time the world does not easily offer in the busy give-and-take of daily life. But it is time that we in the academy have, and time that we should always treasure. In an essay commissioned by the Modern Language Association, Wayne C. Booth, Graff’s colleague at the University of Chicago, wrestled with the question of the scholar in society, and admitted that what makes the scholar is "the willingness to sit alone, for long periods of time, trying to learn something that cannot be learned ‘in society,’ something that cannot be learned except through sustained, private inquiry."11 But, Booth argued, even when alone a scholar is in society, having been born into it, raised in part by it, and always, even when alone, acting in terms of it.

Now this may seem obvious, even trivial. But Booth doesn’t mean it that way. He means rather that a scholar is unable to conceive of ideas in terms other than those that derive from his or her experience of the world in which he or she lives. An idea so conceived is then loosed upon the world in words or formulae—or, in our case, in exhibitions or programs—which perforce acknowledge and further shape that world and the dynamic tension that characterizes the scholar’s relation to it. In this respect, Booth concluded, a scholar is special and distinct from the nonscholar. "Not everyone can be a scholar. Not everyone should be a scholar. But there is no human being whose life would not be enhanced by earning some share in the rational habits. And it is our"—and he means your and my—"task to keep those habits alive. . . . Only if we do that [scholarly] job well, by the way we think, the way we teach, and the way we write, can we claim that we have honored the society that we are in and the society that is in us."12

This is our special mission as academic art museums: to take seriously our role as scholars and to celebrate the circumstances that encourage our scholarship. Our colleagues in community and municipal art museums are not often given the same opportunity we are to refine our scholarly habits. They are more often held hostage to the immediate pressures that bear on their public status. Our cities, indeed all of our public communities, are under constant and considerable pressure to act quickly in response to one problem or another. Lately that means problems only tangentially related to the concerns of art museums. These are problems of political and social disenfranchisement, insufficient education, and, in the case of art education, no education at all. We have all witnessed the withdrawal of our public schools from the responsibility of preparing our children for subtle and sustained inquiry into the complexities of art. Reduced government support for education has in many cases resulted in the total elimination of art classes in our elementary and even in our secondary schools. More and more frequently that task is falling to community and municipal art museums. They are being forced to establish and maintain large and expensive public education departments and to direct their programs to a public less and less educated about art and art history.

In many cases the demand for such programs is made explicitly by our mayors, governors, and local newspaper critics and editorial writers. In other cases, it is made more implicitly and, I would argue, more insidiously, by the attitudes of our granting agencies. How many of us have had to tailor our grant applications—applications made to both public and private foundations—to emphasize the degree to which our exhibitions and publications are intended for a wide and diverse audience? How many of us have had to build into our exhibitions budgets expensive multimedia presentations, teacher training programs, and extensive outreach efforts just to get support for the basic curatorial initiatives that inform the content of our proposed activities? And if we chafe at these demands, imagine the pressure on our municipal art museum colleagues!

Recently, in Massachusetts, the state arts council came under considerable attack from artists and art institutions for diverting traditional funding increasingly to educational programs.13 Why, it was asked, has the arts council become an education council at the expense of supporting art? The answer can only be that our politicians—and, it has to be admitted, our taxpayers, you and I—are searching to find education dollars anywhere they—we—can without raising additional taxes. More and more often, education dollars are being found in our community, state, and even national arts budgets. This is deeply troubling and will have long-term, damaging effects on art and art institutions in this country.

It may seem exaggerated to make this comparison, but similar pressures are being felt within our scientific community. In response to the most recent announcement of Nobel Prizes awarded American scientists, Charles M. Vest, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worried that the "commitment and infrastructure supporting basic science are fraying and in danger of decaying," emphasizing that the recent awards were given for research done more than twenty years ago when basic science received more generous government support. In concurrence, the renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson noted "that the American public seems disinclined to support basic scientific research for its own sake—there appears to be an increasing mood to look at the bottom line."14 And a recent study by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment has documented that federal support for basic science in this country enjoyed a compound annual growth rate of about 15 percent between 1962 and 1967, while in the early 1980s basic research support after inflation was at almost exactly the same level as it had been fifteen years earlier.15

Basic research in the arts—support of artists and scholarship, including exhibitions—has suffered similarly. We have all read the recent debates about reauthorizing the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. And I am sure you have shared my distress at the willingness of senators and representatives to eliminate NEA support for artists because of a very few provocative art works and performances. The NEA—and in this the NEA is hardly alone among supporters of the arts—is under increasing pressure to emphasize the support of broad public education (our applied research) at the expense of art production and scholarship (our basic research). One wonders just what there will be to educate our public about generations from now, except the art of the increasingly distant past and art history of a numbingly conventional kind.16

If not our federal agencies, then who will support basic research in art history and museum practice? Increasingly, this support has been forthcoming from a few private individuals and foundations such as the MacArthur, Luce, Kress, and Mellon Foundations. And of these, only the Mellon Foundation has undertaken a special initiative to support academic art museums. Three years ago, when he was the executive vice president of the Mellon Foundation, Neil Rudenstine, now president of Harvard University, established a program to encourage academic art museums to more fully integrate themselves into the curricula of their colleges and universities. At Harvard, this has permitted us to fund fellowships and internships for graduate students, teaching exhibitions, conservation research, seminars, and special publications involving our curators and conservators as well as students and faculty from numerous departments on campus. Thus, it has helped the Harvard University Art Museums to maintain and even enhance our role as central to the teaching and scholarly mission of the university of which we are a part. But what will happen if and when the Mellon money runs out? How will it be replaced? And by whom? Why do not more funding agencies respect the special mission of the academic art museum? Why must we compete generally with all other art museums for operating and programmatic support when our mission is special and distinct? Why must we show that we are cultivating "new and diverse audiences" to qualify for much of the support that is being offered to museums, when our audience is that of the academy and of the college or university of which we are a part—an audience that is increasingly "new and diverse" in most respects but age.

One wishes that Lynne Cheney, our recent chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who spared no expense in publishing her criticisms of higher education, had spent equal time and resources increasing the Endowment’s support of basic research and defending the rights of all of us to pursue that research wherever it leads, however provocative it may be.17 We have to accept the fact that basic research, whether in the sciences or arts and humanities, is inherently risk-taking: its outcome cannot be determined in advance if its methods are to be valid. That is the nature and promise of academic freedom.

Support of academic freedom assumes confidence in our scholars and in ourselves, and in the social benefits of scholarship itself. Precious little such confidence is evident in American politics today. For that we—or at least those of us who seek inspiration in these matters—are forced to look elsewhere; in my case, to the words of the playwright and president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel. In his recent book, Summer Meditations, Havel wrote that "A moral and intellectual state cannot be established through a constitution, or through law, or through directives, but only through complex, long-term, and never-ending work involving education and self-education. What is needed is lively and responsible consideration of every political step, every decision; a constant stress on moral deliberation and moral judgment; continued self-examination and self-analysis; an endless rethinking of our priorities. It is not, in short, something we can simply declare or introduce. It is a way of going about things, and it demands the courage to breathe moral and spiritual motivation into everything, to seek the human dimension in all things. Science, technology, expertise, and so-called professionalism are not enough. Something more is necessary. For the sake of simplicity, it might be called spirit. Or feeling. Or conscience."18 If only we had a voice like Havel’s leading us today, in this country, we might find greater support for what we as academic art museums mean most to do: pursue research, teaching, and other curatorial practices with the confidence that they are appreciated for the deep and long-term values inherent in them and not for the immediate gratification of short-term political needs.

It may seem that I have strayed rather far from my topic—the mission of the academic art museum—but I hope you can see that I have not. I have the greatest respect for our art institutions and what they can achieve and contribute to the worlds of the academy and the community and municipal art museum and "the world outside." I take academic art museums seriously and I spare no energy, physical or intellectual, in trying to learn more about them. We are a special breed of art museum, however different we are one from another. I urge us all to consider—and always reconsider—the mission of our museums, engaging the widest representation of our institutional constituencies in forming and assessing that mission.

As President Keohane has written, "University faculties and administrators are notoriously dubious about mission statements. How can something as pluralistic, as multifaceted, as wonderfully complex as a modern university have a clear-cut mission?"19 And if that is the case for universities, it is also the case for academic art museums. We share our college’s or university’s skepticism about mission statements. But, as President Keohane said, "We may hope, in the vigorous dialogue of arguing about our mission, to come up with at least a modest statement that we are willing to present to the world. But the real treasure is in the activity, the exercise itself, and the enrichment of common understanding of our purposes."20

James Cuno
Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director

NOTES

1. This is a revised text of a talk delivered as the keynote address to the 1993 annual meeting of the State University of New York Gallery and Museum Association, held on the campus of SUNY College at Buffalo, New York, on 17 October 1993. SUNY GAMA, as the organization is called, serves the fifty-six visual arts centers located on State University of New York two-year, four-year, and university campuses. For their kind invitation to speak, I am grateful to SUNY GAMA president Anna Callouri Holcombe, director of the Tower Art Gallery at SUNY College at Brockport, and president-elect Anthony Bannon, director of the Burchfield Art Center at SUNY College at Buffalo. I want also to acknowledge the help of my colleagues Fran Beane, Marjorie Cohn, Ivan Gaskell, Becky Hunt, and Evelyn Rosenthal, who read through my text a number of times and offered invaluable criticisms and suggestions.

2. See Edward Bryant, "The Boom in U.S. University Museums," Artnews (September 1967): 30–47, 73–75.

3. Jonathan R. Cole, "Balancing Acts: Dilemmas of Choice Facing Research Universities," Daedalus 122, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 8–9.

4. My point is simply that deans, provosts, and presidents come and go and with them come and go their visions for the art museums or galleries under their supervision. One president may see the art museum as a perfect vehicle for improving "town-gown" relations and thus encourage broad outreach into the community. Another president might think the art museum a beautiful place in which to host development-related events entirely unrelated to the fund-raising needs of the museum. But when a subsequent president arrives and finds herself facing a mounting deficit and a call from all quarters to cut costs without sacrificing the core activities of the academic enterprise, the externally active art museum will find itself on the wrong side of the fence.

5. For a discussion of this issue, framed by an account of a recent case at Brandeis University, see my Assets? Well, Yes—of a Kind: Collections in College and University Art Museums and Galleries, Occasional Papers, no. 1 (Cambridge, Fall 1992).

6. Our relationship to the faculty is crucial and should be addressed immediately by every academic art museum and gallery. The closer one’s status is to that of the faculty, the more one will have a voice in the governance of one’s college or university and a say in the future of one’s museum or gallery. The complicated issue of governance and the role of the faculty in it, is explored in Cole, "Balancing Acts," pp. 5–11, and Donald Kennedy, "Making Choices in the Research University," Daedalus 122, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 127–56. For the record, I should point out that by virtue of my position as director of the Harvard University Art Museums, I am also professor of Fine Arts and fully enfranchised in the Faculty of Arts Sciences. My position on the faculty is, however, dependent on my holding the directorship of the Art Museums. Most of our curators and some of our conservators also have dependent positions in the Fine Arts Department, as either lecturer or senior lecturer. They are not, however, enfranchised in the Faculty of Arts Sciences. No museum staff member has tenure (with the exception of our Curator of Ancient Art, who is a "volunteer" curator, holding a professorship in the university’s Classics Department). Our sabbatical policy is strictly of our own making. Our curators are given a three-month sabbatical every five years, or roughly half of what our faculty colleagues are given.

7. Nannerl O. Keohane, "The Mission of the Research University," Daedalus 122, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 123.

8. Ibid., p. 103.

9. Ibid., p. 124.

10. Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York, 1992), p. 15.

11. Wayne C. Booth, The Vocation of a Teacher (Chicago, 1988), p. 46.

12. Ibid., p. 74.

13. The same point was raised by Susan Sturgis in her article "Dollars and Censorship: Does a Funding Shift Toward Education Penalize Controversial Artists?" in the Village Voice, (18 January 1994): 3–4; and in a Boston Globe editorial entitled "A Star for Art’s Sake," which, while praising the recent efforts of the new National Endowment for the Arts director Jane Alexander to win the support of Congress, warned that too much emphasis on the social value of the arts—"the dreary search for ‘relevance,’" the writer called it, a bit too cynically—is itself a kind of censorship ("contriving a social value in order to pass muster with Congress is itself a kind of censorship. Sometimes creativity is not relevant to anything but its own exalting power: art for art’s sake."), Boston Globe (22 January 1994): 10.

14. Anthony Flint, "Nobels Aside, Scholars See Perils for U.S. Research," Boston Globe (15 October 1993): 1 and 26. Recently the U.S. Congress voted to cease funding, and thus effectively to terminate, the superconducting supercollider, described as the largest pure science project ever attempted in our country. See articles in the New York Times (26 October 1993): C1 and C12.

15. Office of Technology Assessment, Federally Funded Research: Decisions for a Decade (Washington, D.C., 1991), cited and discussed in Donald Kennedy, "Making Choices in the Research University," Daedalus 122, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 129–32. For a more comprehensive examination of threats to American basic science, see Rodney M. Nichols, "Federal Science Policy and Universities," Daedalus 122, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 197–224.

16. Andrew Oliver, director of the museum program of the National Endowment for the Arts, calculated that in 1991 the federal government provided about 3 percent of the total income for 320 of our country’s art museums. Further, while reflecting on the recent debate over funding the NEA, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum Services, Oliver suggested that Congress "will more likely continue or increase funds to the three federal agencies not in the realm of presentation, but in the areas of preservation, documentation, and education;" in other words, in the areas of applied research. See Oliver’s remarks in "The Museum and the Government," in Martin Feldstein, The Economics of Art Museums (Chicago, 1991), pp. 91–94. For a clear and coherent presentation of the various kinds of research conducted in museums, see Charles Saumarez-Smith, "Why Do Research?," an account of "how and why the Victoria and Albert Museum does research," in The Art News-paper (November 1993): 17–18.

17. See, for example, Lynne V. Cheney, Tyrannical Machines: A Report on Educational Practices Gone Wrong and Our Best Hopes for Setting Them Right (Washington, D.C., 1992).

18. Vaclav Havel, Summer Meditations, trans. Paul Wilson (New York, 1992), p. 20.

19. Keohane, "The Mission of the Research University," p. 101.

20. Ibid., p. 102.

This is the second in a series of Occasional Papers written from the Director’s Office of the Harvard University Art Museums on topics of special interest to college and university art museums and galleries.

Copyright © 1994 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.