[Nhcoll-l] Duke Petition

[Douglas Yanega]

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
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