It makes more sense to train art historians to be managers than to train administrators—who are not naturally inclined toward the visual arts—to understand and be sympathetic to art or to comprehend the role of the museum (from the Association of Art Museum Directors’ Report on Training Needs for Museum Directors, 1978).
The Museum Management Institute (MMI) is a four-week residential training program in museum management and business practices for midlevel and senior staff members from museums of all disciplines. Conducted annually during the last three weeks of July and the first week of August on the Berkeley campus of the University of California, MMI is a program activity of the J. Paul Getty Trust and is administered by the Art Museum Association of America (AMAA) with the University Extension, University of California, Berkeley (UCB).
MMI had its genesis in the mid-1970s, a period when the increasing scale and complexity of American museums were raising fears that they might no longer be susceptible to management by those who, like most curators and educators, had no more than the customary training in art history, the natural sciences, or other museum-related disciplines. Compounding this was a sense that the economic, legal, and social environments in which museums operated were becoming increasingly difficult. The competition for resources had grown more intense and there appeared to be a drift toward ever-closer scrutiny and more extensive public regulation. The apprehension was that boards of trustees might ultimately conclude that they needed to reach beyond the traditional museum community to bring in—either as directors or, under some newly designed two-headed staff structure, as co-directors—individuals with extensive backgrounds in business, diplomacy, the military, or other “wordly” pursuits. Within the rank and file of museum employees, this was viewed as a potential calamity. Among the strategies considered for countering it was the notion that experienced museum professionals might themselves—through programs of intense and accelerated training—acquire some of the management skills necessary for effective leadership of their institutions. While Harvard University had offered such training since 1971 through its annual summer Institute of Arts Administration (a program it was to continue through 1978), this was designed as much or more for the staffs of performing arts organizations. The experiences of those from museums who had attended were often disappointing.
One of the people who had given considerable thought to how a training program specific to museum professionals might be developed was Virginia Stern, until 1971 the curator in charge of education at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Following her move to California where her husband had been appointed dean of the University Extension at UCB (and following, also, her proposal of such a program to the Association of Art Museum Directors, who received it cordially but took no action), Ms. Stern approached the AMAA—then the Western Association of Art Museums (WAAM)—to suggest that they collaborate in seeking funds to develop a curriculum. Linda Evans, who was then in charge of coordinating WAAM’s educational programs, was particularly responsive. She herself had recently attended the Harvard Institute of Arts Administration and had come to believe that a training program tailored closely to the needs of museum professionals would be more effective than the broader model which Harvard was then offering.
In 1976, Ms. Stern and Ms. Evans requested a planning grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the independent federal agency established by the United States Congress in 1965 to foster the excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts and to help broaden their availability and appreciation. This grant was awarded through WAAM, and a first planning meeting for what was to become MMI was held in Seattle, Washington, in June 1977. In July, a second meeting followed at Mills College in Oakland, California. The recommendations made at these first two meetings were generally accepted by WAAM and became the armature around which MMI was subsequently to develop.
The recommendations agreed on at the first planning meeting dealt chiefly with the eligibility of participants. Notwithstanding that WAAM’s institutional membership consisted solely of art museums (and, at that time, only of art museums located west of the Mississippi River; as AMAA, it is now a national organization), it was recommended that the projected program be open, without geographic limitation, to staff members from museums of every discipline as well as from such related organizations as zoological parks, aquariums, and botanical gardens. To qualify for admission, the committee recommended that an applicant must have completed a minimum of four years of museum work, be currently employed by a museum, and be able to demonstrate institutional support for his or her attendance, preferably through employer-paid tuition but at least through salary continuation. Like the Harvard Institute of Arts Administration, it was proposed that the program be residential and scheduled to run for four weeks, but that the classes should be smaller. Initially it was recommended that these be limited to thirty participants. For budget reasons, this figure was later increased to thirty-five. Finally, the committee urged that every effort be made to provide a substantial pool of scholarship funds to assist participants in meeting their tuition fees, subsistence costs, and transportation.
Also recommended at that first planning meeting was that a university affiliation be given to the program. This, it was thought, would enhance both its credibility and its visibility. Given Ms. Stern’s contact with UCB, which had expressed some previous interest, and given also that the UCB campus included three major museums (the Lawrence Hall of Science, the Robert H. Lowie Museum of Anthropology, and the University Art Museum), it seemed the ideal first choice. In due course, the UCB University Extension agreed to provide a site for the program (the library of the Men’s Faculty Club, a 1900 Bernard Maybeck building), and to award continuing education units and certificates upon the course’s completion. It also assisted in procuring the use of a university sorority house—otherwise unoccupied in summer—to serve as the program’s residence and in arranging for participants to have access to the UCB’s health clinic and its extensive recreational facilities.
At the second of these planning meetings, the focus was on the curriculum and faculty structure. Almost from the start, it was agreed that the curriculum should not include any “museological” topics such as conservation, collections management, or interpretation. Given the few classroom hours that would be available (less than 140), the availability elsewhere of courses covering these topics, and the presumed experience of the expected participants and the diversity of disciplines from which they would come, it appeared more useful to concentrate instruction on the two areas which the planning group had identified as most critical and which would be common to all the participants: human resources management and financial management. It was recommended that approximately 75 percent of instructional time be allotted to these. The balance was to be used for a variety of topics clustered around the nodes of governance, information management, the external environment, and professional standards. This in fact became the curriculum with which MMI began.
A major complaint about the Harvard Institute of Arts Administration had been the absence from its teaching staff of any practitioners with actual experience of working in arts organizations. Museum professionals who had attended the Harvard program complained that there were no senior members of the field available with whom they could discuss on an ongoing basis the practical relevance of management theories they were being taught. To rectify this, the planning group recommended a threetier structure that would incorporate practicing museum professionals as a critical element.
At the top of this structure would be a director who would be in residence throughout the full four weeks and serve as a linking element for the various curriculum units. He or she was envisioned as coming from the world of continuing education and possessing teaching and counseling skills as well as having experience in the design and administration of institutes, conferences, and seminars. Working with the director would be four co-directors—to avoid confusion, this title was subsequently changed to senior museum associate—who would each serve for one week. They would be expected both to teach and to assist in interpreting the materials presented by the management faculty. To be sought as senior museum associates were museum directors or department heads from museums of different disciplines with at least fifteen to twenty years of experience and solid reputations within the profession. Finally, to complete this structure, there would be a management faculty, drawn chiefly from business schools and consulting firms, chosen for its subject-matter expertise rather than any particular familiarity with museums. With but two changes—the addition of an associate director to assist the director and of a financial management associate to take overall charge of the financial topics within the curriculum—this faculty structure has proven satisfactory and remains unchanged.
A final task of that second planning meeting was to recommend a name for the proposed program. After winnowing a good number, “Museum Management Institute” was finally proposed and accepted. Additional planning meetings were held in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1978 and early 1979 to address questions of funding, participant selection, and instructional methods. Concerning the last, it was agreed that the nature of the subject and the general maturity of the participants would require that a broad range of teaching devices be employed. Over MMI’s first seven years these have come to include case studies (some real, some hypothetical), group exercises, role-playing, self-study instruments, films, videotapes, field trips, hands-on computer experience, the maintenance of daily journals, and extensive homework in addition to straight classroom lectures. Participants are also sent several written assignments to be completed before their arrival in Berkeley.
With additional support from the NEA, MMI undertook its first institute in July 1979. Since then, an annual institute has been held each summer, and—through the 1985 institute—the number of participants who have completed the program totals nearly 250. Ten of these have come from outside the United States: five from Canada, two from Australia, and one each from Israel, Mexico, and Venezuela. For all except the 1980 and 1981 institutes, the Chi Omega sorority house located on Piedmont Avenue and only a few minutes’ walk from the Berkeley campus has been leased to serve as the program’s residence.
While tuition charges cover a portion of the institute’s annual operating expenses, from 1979 through 1983 the larger part of these had to be raised from a combination of outside sources. Joining with the NEA to help meet such expenses were the California Arts Council, the Hewlett, Donner, and Exxon foundations, and in 1982 and 1983, the J. Paul Getty Trust. As early as 1981, though, the AMAA had concluded that this piecemeal pattern of funding was not indefinitely sustainable and that the institute might have to be discontinued unless a more stable economic base could be established. Approaching the Getty Trust, the AMAA proposed that the latter take permanent responsibility for the program. Pending a decision, the trust provided partial interim funding for the two following summers while it commissioned a series of studies of MMI’s curriculum, utility, effectiveness, and potential market. Satisfied by these that the program could make an important contribution to the vitality and stability of museums generally, the trust assumed MMI’s full financial and operating responsibilities in 1984.
With but a few changes, the content of MMI’s curriculum has remained remarkably close to the model first designed in 1977. Several topics (collective bargaining and space planning being two) have been dropped, a group of scattered sessions dealing with visitor surveys, public relations, membership, and development have been reorganized into a core concentration on marketing, and the classroom time devoted to working with computers has been doubled. In 1984 and 1985, the participants traveled to San Jose, California, to take a two-day executive computer training program given at the IBM Education Center.
The most important curriculum change, however, has involved sequencing rather than content. In the most recent institutes, the courses follow what might best be described as an ascending spiral in which the participants begin by concentrating on their personal roles in the management process (What assumptions do they bring to it? What are their preferred styles of learning? How do they best communicate?), then proceed to questions of management inside their institutions (How do they motivate others? How do they assure that resources are being used effectively and efficiently? How do budgets and other financial devices operate as systems of control?), and then, finally, move on to the management of their organizations in the outside world (What is strategic planning, and how can it best function in museums? What impact should local considerations have on program decisions? How do marketing concepts apply in a nonprofit setting? What are the uses and limits of public relations?). The culmination of this last phase is their immersion in a two-day-long integrative case study in which, working through their project teams, participants are asked to imagine themselves at some critical juncture in the evolution of a very real museum and to apply much of what they have learned during the three previous weeks.
While the MMI curriculum continues to be ostensibly free of museological concerns, an intimate familiarity with day-today museum operations nevertheless remains the warp across which most of its instruction is woven. In this connection, the participants’ homogeneity of experience has proven an enormous advantage. Sharing many common assumptions, particularly about the centrality of collections and their care, they are able to work through museum-related case studies and other exercises with a confidence, skill, and depth of consideration that would not be possible for a more heterogeneous group which first needed to master the setting before it could address the underlying issues. That the participants have an immediate sense of what each other does has also proven an important element in creating an atmosphere of mutual respect. A registrar, for example, need say nothing more than that he or she is responsible for a collection of X million objects for the rest of an MMI class readily to understand just what such a job entails.
This homogeneity has also contributed significantly (and perhaps even more than the original planning committee has anticipated) to the intensity with which each summer’s participants interact with one another and the dispatch with which they form themselves into a group convinced that its class is either the “best” or certainly the “most special” since the program’s inception. This sense of cohesion and the energy it seems to engender have become important adjuncts to MMI’s other instructional methods.
To strengthen this interaction further, and also to assure that loyalties continue to run toward the group overall rather than to any cliques within it, a number of adjustments have been made in recent years. For one thing, both breakfast and the evening meal are now served in the residence on a communal basis. Formerly, only breakfasts were eaten together, and who was to go out with whom for dinner—this frequently involved driving and tended to put the owners of cars in a momentarily advantageous social position—was sometimes an occasion for wounded feelings. Also, participants are assigned in advance to eight- or nine-person project teams which are changed each week so that every participant has the opportunity to work closely with as many other participants as possible. The requirement of residence, sometimes waived in the early days for those who lived in the Bay Area, is now strictly enforced. Finally, several evenings of information sharing have been introduced into the first week, enabling participants to project slides of exhibitions and other activities at their home institutions and to talk about their own career experiences and aspirations.
A fully evolved MMI class pursuing a case study late into the night and all but oblivious of any world beyond its Men’s Faculty Club classroom and Chi Omega sorority house residence is an awesome sight. The energy released may also be one key to the program’s success. To be sustained within MMI’s protective ambit for a period of four weeks, surrounded wholly by colleagues absorbed in a common interest and generally free of the everyday duties of work and family life, becomes a unique opportunity for professional growth and learning. That this should come about nearly as much from the interchange among the participants as from their formal classroom instruction has become one of MMI’s greatest strengths.
To advise the J. Paul Getty Trust not only with respect to MMI but also as to other future activities in the field of museum management training generally, the trust’s president, Harold Williams, has recently appointed a Museum Management Advisory Committee composed of senior individuals from both within and outside the American museum community. With the additional experience, knowledge, and skill this group will bring to the planning process, the possibility now exists that some means might be devised to disseminate the instructional materials and methods developed for MMI to a larger audience and also—in response to a frequent demand from past MMI participants—that a series of “postgraduate” workshops might eventually be instituted. Making some broader use of MMI’s materials and methods seems increasingly urgent as the demand for management training increases. MMI’s 1985 institute attracted some 120 applications—a record number for any year—for the 35 places that were available. Many highly qualified applicants had to be turned away, and those accepted averaged more than eleven years of individual museum experience. That was also a record high.
The increases in the complexity of museums and their environment that initially impelled the need for management training have not abated. As it is currently constituted, MMI can meet only a fraction of the total demand. Its importance, however, ought not to be measured in numbers but rather by the efficacy of its innovations. MMI has become, and will continue to be, an important laboratory for the development of new ways through which dedicated museum professionals can be better equipped to take leadership positions within their own institutions and in the field. By helping to calm the apprehension so rampant in the time of its creation—the fear that museums had become too complicated to be managed by museum people—MMI can be said to have made an important contribution and provided an exemplary beginning.
In 1987 the AMAA merged into the American Federation of Arts, which continues to administer MMI. While some of the details of MMI itself have continued to change, its original purpose and shape have remained intact through to the plans for its 1990 offering.
Copyright © 1985 by Stephen E. Weil. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Butterworths from The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship. Volume 4, Number 3, September 1985.