[NHCOLL-L:3231] RE: From the Chronicle of Higher Education -- Natural His...

[CAHawks at aol.com]

John, et al.
 
Actually, the Wagner has been the subject of an intense conservation  program 
for over a decade - however, they have rightly made the restoration of  the 
building, the basic envelope for the collections, as the first priority. The  
library and archives were the second priority and not only now have a new  
facility, but an active conservation lab. The specimen collections will be  
addressed as soon as the rest of the facility upgrades are completed. In the  
interim, numerous steps have been taken to ensure preservation of the specimens,  
including some active treatment programs. It wasn't neglect, but a conscious  
decision that Joseph Leidy's interpretation and that of his colleagues had some  
merit for preservation that kept the exhibits unchanged over time.
 
Cathy
 
 
 
In a message dated 10/27/2006 9:59:21 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,  
jsimmons at ku.edu writes:

 
Jane (and everyone else)--here is  the full article.  It is an interesting 
essay, with some well thought out  ideas and some not so well thought out.  The 
author been says that the  Wagner Free Institute of Science has been 
"preserved by benign neglect."   This is unfair--the Wagner is not allowed to change 
its exhibits under the  terms established by its founder.  Also, the author 
laments changes in  exhibits "in deference to current theory," but isn't that what 
science is all  about?  On the plus side, I love the author's phrase, "the 
imperialism of  the juvenile," and I applaud his general conclusion that museums 
need to  "rediscover a way to honor the past and embrace the complexity of 
science as a  social institution in a manner that respects the intelligence of 
visitors, old  and young, from every kind of background." 
--John 
John E.  Simmons 
Collection Manager, Natural History Museum &  Biodiversity Research  Center 
and 
Director, Museum Studies  Program 
University of  Kansas 
Dyche  Hall 
1345  Jayhawk Boulevard 
Lawrence,  Kansas 66045-7561 
Telephone  785-864-4508 
FAX  785-864-5335 
_jsimmons at ku.edu_ (mailto:jsimmons at ku.edu)  
www._nhm.ku.edu/herpetology/_ (http://nhm.ku.edu/herpetology/)  
_www.ku.edu/~museumst/_ (http://www.ku.edu/~museumst/)  
_http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/10/2006100901c/careers.html_ 
(http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/10/2006100901c/careers.html)  
Monday, October 9, 2006 
The Decline of the Natural-History  Museum   
By Thomas H. Benton 
Sometimes I wonder whether I have chosen the wrong  profession.  How many 
English professors, after all, have a 6-foot-long  reproduction of Rudolph 
Zallinger's The Age of Reptiles mural from Yale's  Peabody  Museum hanging in their  
home office above cabinets full of fossils, butterflies, and  seashells? 
As a child, I was, like many kids, fascinated by  dinosaurs. One of my most 
powerful early memories is of visiting the great  hall of Philadelphia's 
Academy of Natural  Sciences: an enormous 19th-century gallery  decorated, as I 
recall, with wrought iron, entablatures, oak, and marble. I  remember my footsteps 
echoing as I walked toward the polished railing behind  which stood the 
Hadrosaurus, more than 20 feet tall and impossibly ancient.  The mounted skeleton 
-- brown, lacquered, and crackled, like a Rembrandt  painting -- revealed 
itself gradually as my eyes adjusted to the  light. 
Dinosaur Hall was a temple dedicated to the wonder of  creation, the 
aspirations of science, and the smallness of humanity in the  context of geologic 
time. 
I kept that faith, earning top grades in science  courses, until my junior 
year of high school, when the rigors of trigonometry  and physics -- the 
empirical fetish -- more or less put an end to my  scientific ambitions, if not to my 
love of science. It surprises some people  when I say that the closest cousin 
to science, for me, was English, because  it, too, was about the cultivation 
of wonder and  imagination. 
Nowadays, when a scholarly conference brings me to  Philadelphia, New  York, 
Chicago, or Washington, I try to  make a trip to their natural-history 
museums. But I rarely find what I am  looking for. I suppose I am trying to relive my 
childhood. I know the past is  easy to glorify, but I do not think my 
disappointment comes only from my  tendency toward nostalgia and old-fogeyism. 
I think natural-history museums have changed for the  worse in the last 30 
years. The solitude, silence, and quasi-religious awe  that I remember have been 
banished by throngs of screaming, barely supervised  children on school 
trips, who pay less attention to the exhibits than they do  to the gift shops and 
food courts. 
No doubt, the museums were forced into that situation  by economic necessity 
and political demands that they cater to the broadest  possible segment of the 
public. That means museums simplify their exhibitions  rather than expect 
visitors to aspire to a higher level of appreciation for  something outside the 
normal range of experience. 
I remember, even as a 10-year-old, not liking the new  children's annexes t
hat were first installed back in the 70s. I felt a little  insulted, as if I was 
being made to watch Sesame Street, or spend time in a  day-care center.  
Clearly, these "Please Touch" museums have to cater to  a wide age range, 
but, just as it often does in the classroom, that seems to  mean aiming at an 
ever-lowering median of knowledge, interest, and common  civility. 
My 7-year-old daughter also loves natural history. She  likes being able to 
handle real fossils and touch exotic animals, but she does  not like being 
crowded and trampled on by other children who often reduce  museums to something 
approximating life in the Hobbesian state of nature. So  we have learned to 
avoid the so-called children's sections, even though the  behavior they encourage 
seems to have spilled out to the rest of the  museum. 
Unfortunately, the Academy of Natural  Sciences was a victim of the 
imperialism of the  juvenile back in the mid-80s. Dinosaur Hall, no longer a chapel, is 
now  brightly lit and painted in "kid-friendly" colors. The architectural 
details  are concealed beneath wall-to-wall carpeting and plaster board. Toward 
the  back of the hall, a dated "high tech" video installation inserts kids into 
a  picture with dinosaurs in it, as if they were starring in Jurassic Park, a 
movie that today's children are  no more likely to have seen than the old TV 
show, Land of the Lost. The kids  make ugly faces and dance while watching 
themselves on screen until the next  group comes in and shoves them out. 
Never mind that Dinosaur Hall was one of the most  important sites in the 
institutional history of paleontology. Discovered in  1858, the academy's 
Hadrosaurus was the first mounted dinosaur skeleton in the  world. Dinomania started 
in Philadelphia. 
Now the towering Hadrosaurus is hunched over -- in  deference to current 
theory -- and banished to an inconspicuous corner to make  room for a gathering of 
fossil replicas designed as photo-ops. Instead of  gazing up at a relic of 
the heroic era of Victorian science, people ignore the  Hadrosaurus and get 
their picture taken with their head beneath the jaws of  the scary Giganotosaurus, 
a sort of Tyrannosaurus Rex on steroids, before  going to the gift shop to 
buy a "sharp toothed" plush toy. See, kids, science  can be fun! 
But programmed "fun" is not necessarily pleasure, nor  is entertainment the 
only means of sparking an interest in science. The people  who run museums 
these days seem to think that children cannot enjoy quiet  reflection. I suppose 
they think that would be elitist. As a result, decorum  -- once one of the key 
lessons of the museum for children -- is replaced by  the rules of schoolyard, 
the serious is usurped by the cute, and thought is  banished by the chatter 
of last decade's high-tech  gizmos. 
In Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads: The Culture  and Evolution of Natural 
History Museums (Oxford, 2001), Stephen T. Asma  quotes one curator from the 
Field Museum in Chicago: "The sad fact is that  many quieter people, who put in 
years of good work at the Field Museum, have  recently lost their jobs to more 
dynamic but less educated competitors. The  nature of the work, hunched over 
tiny bugs or fossils in a hidden-away  cubicle, for example, traditionally drew 
introverts to the curator and staff  jobs. And the museum nurtured them." 
Instead, the curator laments that "the  current trend is for museum trustees and 
administrators to ignore the  internal, albeit quirky, talent when staffing 
positions of power and go  outside for M.B.A.'s who frequently don't know 
anything about the nuances of  the subject matter." 
Fortunately, it is still possible in some of the  larger museums and the more 
obscure ones to find older exhibits -- silent  corridors of glass cases 
filled with specimens -- that have not been ruined by  the addition of push-button 
TV sets, cuddly mascots, and other contemporary  affectations. In particular, 
I enjoy the animal dioramas created from the  1920s through the 1940s. Those 
are not mere scientific displays; they are  among the most interesting and 
underrated art works of the 20th century. Some  of them are the three-dimensional 
equivalents of Audubon's Birds of  America. 
Successful museum installations need not always  require huge expenditures 
for blockbuster attractions like the Field Museum's $8-million T-rex, "Sue,"   
the most expensive fossil in the world (the  conspicuous cost being the real 
attraction). 
I remember that the second-best thing about the  Academy of  Natural 
Sciences, back in  the 70s, was something called the "Trading Post." It was a large 
display  counter full of rocks, fossils, and bones. Kids could bring in 
specimens from  their own collections and trade them for something new. I once brought 
in a  box of ordinary seashells from the Jersey  shore and exchanged them for 
two skulls: a cat and a rabbit, as I recall. The  Trading Post always gave 
kids the better end of the bargain, and it kept me  exploring the creeks and 
vacant lots in my neighborhood, discovering that  nature even existed inside the 
city. (Those specimens are still in my  cabinets, and my daughters are 
starting to add their own findings to  the 
collection.) 
There are also a few museums that have been preserved  by benign neglect, 
such as the Wagner Free Institute of Science, also in  Philadelphia,  and the 
Harvard Museum of Natural History. And, I think, foremost in the  United States, 
the American Museum of Natural History in New York has  preserved, expanded, 
and updated itself without sacrificing too much of its  history and grandeur. 
In the American Museum, for example, the curators took  the risk of having 
their enormous Barosaurus rear up, with its head 50 feet in  the air, defending 
its young from an advancing Allosaurus. Set amid the marble  columns of 
Roosevelt Memorial Hall, the display is awe-inspiring, perhaps the  greatest mounted 
dinosaur in the world. The museum's Barosaurus is probably  bad science, but 
it is also an important work of public art that expresses the  obligations of 
one generation to another in a medium that a child can  appreciate as well as 
an adult. 
Natural-history museums are not just about science.  Why couldn't the academy 
in Philadelphia leave Dinosaur Hall alone? Were  the memories associated with 
that setting not worth anything to the curators?  No doubt for the hard 
pressed natural-history museum, an alliance between  science and business -- i.e., 
entertainment, tourism, and merchandising --  seems more sustainable than the 
old linkage between science and the humanities  -- i.e., art, history, and 
even religion, and their combined power to  cultivate wonder and imagination. 
On the other hand, I do admire the efforts of many  natural-history museums 
-- in particular, the American Museum in New York  and the Smithsonian 
Institutions National Museum of Natural History in  Washington  -- to challenge their 
visitors, to stand up against the pressure to expunge  evolution, and to 
defend the ideas that led to their  founding. 
If museums could keep in the foreground their complex,  contentious, and 
interdisciplinary histories -- while avoiding the tendency to  turn themselves 
into theme parks and shopping malls -- they might rediscover a  way to honor the 
past and embrace the complexity of science as a social  institution in a 
manner that respects the intelligence of visitors, old and  young, from every kind 
of background. 
In the process, they might make some political  enemies, jeopardize some 
corporate donations, and sell fewer plush toys. They  might also demand more from 
their current audience of captive schoolchildren.  And that might be a good 
thing, if they aren't bankrupted in the  process. 
>From the perspective of a long-time lover of natural  history, it's a risk 
worth taking. 
Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of an associate  professor of English at a 
Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes about  academic culture and 
welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at  careers at chronicle.com




 
Catharine  Hawks
Conservator
2419 Barbour Road
Falls Church VA 22043-3026  USA
t/f 703.876.9272
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/private/nhcoll-l/attachments/20061030/9f9340c0/attachment.html