[NHCOLL-L:1901] Re: Threatened Collections: one view
Dennis Paulson
dpaulson at ups.edu
Fri Apr 18 11:59:26 EDT 2003
>Here is the full version of the comment that I provided to USA Today.
>
>Elaine Hoagland
Elaine, thank you for presenting this story so very well. I hope we
are able to reverse or at least stop this trend, but that
anti-intellectual train coming down the track that Doug described so
clearly has already pushed us to war with Iraq, it's rolling back
environmental protection and taking away our civil liberties, and
it's letting the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It's the
train of rampant capitalism, and it won't be stopped. Some days I
think the only hope for natural history museums would be to sponsor
network TV shows (soap operas and sitcoms) about their function and
value and let the Great American Public in as supporters. But I'm
not even sure that would do it, as it's so clear that right now our
government runs the people rather than the people running the
government.
Museums have tried to enhance the public's appreciation of what we
do, in particular by the increased emphasis of exhibits over
research, in some cases a drastic re-emphasis that results in the
virtual shut-down of the research components, but I wonder what it
has brought us. I wonder how effective the dazzling and expensive
and often interactive exhibits have been in actually enhancing the
museums' value in the eyes of the public. Or is this just allowing
those museums to keep their doors open?
The only thing that is clear is that we do have to turn a lot more of
our attention, sadly, away from collection research and toward
collection survival.
Dennis
--
Dennis Paulson, Director phone 253-879-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax 253-879-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail dpaulson at ups.edu
1500 N. Warner, #1088
Tacoma, WA 98416-1088
http://www.ups.edu/biology/museum/museum.html
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