[Nhcoll-l] Duke Petition

Fri Feb 16 14:51:36 EST 2024

Hello,
If folks are writing letters, another important point to make is that when
institutions lose collections, students/staff/community members lose the
potential to interact with collections and learn their value. I've argued
that the many small collections held at colleges and universities are
invaluable for increasing the visibility of the value of natural history
collections, if the collections are used in courses/education/outreach
coupled with stories about what we can learn from specimens.
Best,
Peter Wimberger

On Fri, Feb 16, 2024 at 9:17 AM 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
>
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