[NHCOLL-L:3223] FW: The Academy of Natural Sciences' donated mineral stashes are worth millions. Not everyone is happy.

Wed Oct 25 16:07:39 EDT 2006

FYI....

Jane MacKnight 
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Cincinnati Museum Center 
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Posted on Sun, Oct. 22, 2006

Museum will sell a dusty legacy
The Academy of Natural Sciences' donated mineral stashes are worth
millions. Not everyone is happy.
By Tom Avril
Inquirer Staff Writer

As Philadelphia welcomes 6,000 geologists for their annual convention
today, here's an ironic coincidence: The city's natural-history museum
is abandoning the rocks-and-minerals business.

Trustees of the cash-strapped Academy of Natural Sciences voted Tuesday
to sell more than 15,000 minerals and gems that hadn't been cleaned or
displayed for decades. Workers then began boxing up specimens for an
unnamed private dealer, acting academy president Ian Davison said.

"To me, it's a very sad day when this kind of thing happens," said
Stephen G. Wells, president of the Geological Society of America, which
will meet through Wednesday at the Convention Center.

Orphans Court Judge Joseph D. O'Keefe cleared the move this month with
the consent of the state Attorney General's Office. The sale price was
not disclosed, but the items form the bulk of a collection with an
estimated value of several million dollars.

The academy must return to court for permission to sell its remaining
7,000-odd pieces - including silver, gold, diamonds and everyday quartz
- because William S. Vaux, who donated them 123 years ago, requested
that they never be sold.

The items represent a bit of old Philadelphia, when gentlemen amateurs
went off collecting in exotic locales and sometimes bestowed their finds
on public institutions. These legacies can present a quandary when
museums change their missions and face dwindling resources; witness the
turmoil over moving the famous Barnes art collection to the Benjamin
Franklin Parkway.

No one disputes that the academy, having suffered through staff cuts and
a string of deficits, can use the money. The proceeds will go to its
endowment to support its library. Given that some of the minerals will
end up with other museums, some say they are better off being sold and
seen than locked up at the red-brick facility on Logan Circle.

Yet the move has drawn fire inside and out of the world-renowned,
194-year-old institution, home to 17 million fossil, plant and animal
specimens.

Two employees who oppose the sale said Davison had told the staff not to
talk to reporters.

Davison said he had done that because most staffers did not know all the
facts and had never seen the collection, which has been shut in a vault
for most of the last half-century. Some specimens are crumbling and will
have to be thrown out, he said.

"Staff who are unhappy about something, complaining about something, and
potentially disseminating inaccurate information are not going to help
an institution like the academy," Davison said.

Opponents outside the museum include Trina Vaux, great-great-niece of
the man who donated the items that still require approval before a sale.

"I think the entire collection represents a really important part of
Philadelphia's heritage," said Vaux, who lives in Bryn Mawr. "This is
really the cradle of American mineralogy."

Maria Luisa Crawford, a research professor of geology at Bryn Mawr
College, said it might be reasonable for the academy to sell the
collection because it had no one on staff to study and care for it.
According to a court petition filed by academy attorneys, there has been
no mineral lab or curator since the 1950s, except when a grant was used
to hire one from 1976 to 1981.

The problem, Crawford said, is that the collection might be broken up.

"Many of the pieces may be bought by individual collections and
therefore disappear" from public view, she said.

Davison said the academy had tried to find another museum to buy the
entire collection. That effort began five years ago when the board opted
not to maintain a collection not tied to active research.

The buyer of the non-Vaux pieces represents a consortium of "private
parties," Davison said, but has agreed to offer selections of local
minerals to museums in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

The agreement of sale also requires that the small number of samples of
special scientific significance be given to another research
institution, he said. There are perhaps a dozen of these so-called
"type" specimens, used as the standard by which other samples can be
identified.

Some say the proceedings have been handled badly. John S. White, a
former curator of minerals and gems at the Smithsonian Institution,
accuses the academy of allowing a conflict of interest.

An agent who tried to sell the collection was also involved in
appraising it, White wrote in a letter to former academy president D.
James Baker.

Davison said that agent had not been involved in the eventual sale, and
there was no conflict.

A local expert on nonprofits said the academy still should have
considered hiring someone else.

"To me, arm's length is arm's length in this business," said Nancy Burd,
vice president for grant-making at the nonprofit Philadelphia
Foundation. "Just try to stay as clean as possible."

In Orphans' Court, O'Keefe approved the academy's determination that
there were no restrictions on the non-Vaux items.

And while an 1883 agreement with the family directs that the Vaux items
never be sold or broken up, judges sometimes allow bequests to be
altered, as evidenced by the Barnes case, said Virginia Sikes, a lawyer
in the Philadelphia office of Montgomery, McCracken, Walker & Rhoads.

There is a public interest in encouraging people to make museum
donations, but there can also be a public interest in allowing changes
in wills when circumstances dictate it, she said:

"Maybe courts are more willing when many, many years have lapsed."

  _____  

Contact staff writer Tom Avril at 215-854-2430 or tavril at phillynews.com.
Inquirer staff writer Sandy Bauers contributed to this article. 

  _____  

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