The past year’s news for university museums has been bleak. The University of Arizona art museum decided to fire its curatorial and educational staff, several major universities have sought to sell parts of their museum-based art collections–in violation of all applicable codes of museum ethics–and Brandeis University announced its plans to close its art museum and liquidate its collections to shore up endowment losses and university-wide operational deficits. While it is widely understood that many of these actions violate the ethical codes of museums, some argue that universities need not abide by these codes. Their mission is to be universities, not museums, and they are justified in violating museum ethics if it allows them to better fund other operations.
Hogwash.
Universities that include museums–especially accredited museums–have accepted an obligation to treat museum collections in accordance with ethical standards in the museum world.
Does this mean that all universities are bound by the ethical codes of the American Association of Museums or the Association of Art Museum Directors? Certainly not. Different professions have differing codes of ethics or of professional conduct, and it would be arrant nonsense to suggest that universities are somehow bound by the crosscutting and sometimes contradictory codes of every profession represented by their faculty or by their diverse fields of study.
But when universities choose to create an entity on campus–a hospital, for example–they do become obligated to manage that entity in accordance with all of the applicable professional ethics of that field. Of course universities are not obligated to obey hospital ethics in all of their activities or in managing all of their departments. But university hospitals must obey them, and university hospitals must be managed by the university in accord with those rules.
The same logic applies to university museums. Universities need not order all their affairs in accordance with museum ethics, but they must follow these ethics in managing their museums and museum collections. Violating those ethics when it seems financially advantageous to do so is an all-too-clear statement of what the university really values, of how deeply it lives its commitment to integrity and honesty, of how much it demands those qualities of itself and how effectively it communicates those qualities to its students.
John Ruskin famously wrote that we record our legacy in three books–the book of our words, the book of our deeds, and the book of our art. Selling off the book of art, in violation of recognized and acknowledged ethical prohibitions, is a passage in a university’s book of deeds that give the lie to any lofty ideals in its book of words about integrity and character.
And our students read all three.
As this year’s Art in Bloom poster indicates, art has long celebrated the beauties (and sometimes the terrors) of the natural world. Each year in early March, the annual