[Nhcoll-l] Duke Petition

[Polly, P. David]

I completely agree with Doug's points for practical suggestions for how to make a case to university administrators whose priorities lie elsewhere.

Another point I think is useful in regard to  bad PR is that the bad PR is permanent,  thanks to taxonomic and museum practice.  My favorite example is the Princeton Vertebrate Paleontology Collection, which includes a huge number of type specimens from the 19th and 20th centuries.  Princeton discarded their collection, which was then transferred to Yale.  The Princeton numbers are still used in order to match the numbers used in publications.  I guess it must have been 40 years ago when the transfer took place, but every year one sees social media posts from students new to the field, "Why didn't anyone tell me that the Princeton Collection is at Yale??"  And so Princeton's irresponsibility is learned over and over and over by every new generation of researchers.



On Feb 16, 2024, at 12:17 PM, Douglas Yanega <dyanega at gmail.com> wrote:


If I might make a suggestion:

I have to confess that I'm not entirely convinced regarding the effectiveness of petitions and e-mail campaigns. Call me a cynic, but it seems too easy for the people on the receiving end to not even read the e-mails, and not even care who has signed on to the petitions.

Over the last few decades, if I've noticed any pattern among the failures versus successes in getting administrative decisions like this reversed, it's that the more visible and public the outcry, the better - newspaper stories, op-eds, radio interviews, and so forth - where the story is exposed to the light of day, and an entirely different level of pressure is applied. People act differently when they know that everyone is watching.

In that vein, I'd like to suggest that those of us who work in natural history collections can - in addition to the emails and petitions - also act more directly by producing a well-researched opinion piece, hitting as many "talking points" as possible, made public as quickly as possible, and made as broadly visible as possible.

Consider the following, for example:

The admins are thinking to move everything in the Duke Herbarium to other institutions. Do we know whether there are enough other institutions capable of assimilating that much material? How close to capacity are the other regional herbaria? How well-staffed and well-funded are those other herbaria? In other words, if the premise that the Duke admins are acting from is that they can find "good foster homes" for all these specimens, where they will be taken care of better than they could at Duke, can we provide them with evidence that this is NOT a viable plan, and that the other places the specimens could be sent don't have enough room, don't have enough staff, and don't have enough funding to take care of the material? I would suspect, myself, that even in the best case scenario, it's likely to be decades before that many fostered specimens could possibly all be integrated into their new homes, and made fully accessible to the research community again. Show that their basic premise is flawed, and why, in practical terms that they can understand.

I'm skeptical that career admins are going to find arguments about the biodiversity crisis compelling, but if we can give some stark and definitive statistics about collections, that might get their attention. Things like (1) the number of herbaria that have closed down in the last 50 years compared to the number that have been newly-created (2) trends in the number of grants going to herbaria over time, and the adjusted total dollar amounts OF those grants (3) trends in staffing over time. I'm betting that those figures won't look too good, and the worse they look, the more compelling the argument becomes, to not only keep the Duke herbarium open, but to invest MORE money into the facility. If they're truly concerned about making sure those specimens are well taken care of, then the best way to accomplish that is to make their present home the best home they could have. At the risk of a clumsy analogy, if parents are on the verge of divorce, the best thing for their kids is not to ship them all off to foster care, but to fix the marriage.

Bear in mind also that the more compelling the evidence that herbaria are struggling, and the situation getting worse, then by making the information very public, we can draw more attention to the general problem that we are ALL facing - and I doubt that it's going to reflect well on the Duke admins if they're perceived as kicking someone when they're down. Bad PR is compelling in its own special way.

I suspect that I am, in large part, preaching to the proverbial choir here, but grant me my moment of ranting.

All that said, I do not know the answers to the questions I've raised - I don't know what the relevant figures are, or how to obtain this information. Maybe there are list subscribers affiliated with SPNHC or AIBS, etc., who DO have these statistics at their fingertips, and would be willing to share them. For all I know, someone here has published a recent paper or given a talk about the state of US herbaria, and we can just cite that. Maybe someone here has a good idea of a venue and a format for composing a collective online document that a bunch of us can write interactively, and distribute widely once it's completed. Even if all that gets created is a list of "talking points", then as long as that list is shared, if any of us are interviewed, we have a resource we can turn to, and we can present a coherent and consistent message. I'm certainly not the one who can do all this, but if I can even get things started, I'll feel like I've done something constructive. Call me a cynic, but I'm thinking we might even need to build a playbook-style resource called "What to do in case someone threatens to shut down a collection" that we can refer to the next time this happens. And, sadly, we all KNOW it will happen again.

Peace,

--
Doug Yanega      Dept. of Entomology       Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California, Riverside, CA 92521-0314     skype: dyanega
phone: (951) 827-4315 (disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
             https://faculty.ucr.edu/~heraty/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82

_______________________________________________
Nhcoll-l mailing list
Nhcoll-l at mailman.yale.edu
https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/nhcoll-l

_______________________________________________
NHCOLL-L is brought to you by the Society for the Preservation of
Natural History Collections (SPNHC), an international society whose
mission is to improve the preservation, conservation and management of
natural history collections to ensure their continuing value to
society. See http://www.spnhc.org for membership information.
Advertising on NH-COLL-L is inappropriate.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/nhcoll-l/attachments/20240216/55d58887/attachment.html>