Another interesting question on MUSEUM-L...
 
I've been teaching Museum Studies (within the broader frame of Cultural
Heritage Management) for five years now, and the initial doubts I had about
the purpose of such training have turned around to a much more positive
view.  You have to understand that, though I'm teaching the topic, I don't
have any academic qualification in it - they didn't run such programs in
Australia when I began my museum career.  So I started teaching with the
idea that I had fairly broad professional experience, some knowledge of the
literature, a BA in history and MAs in archaeology and material culture
study, and that should be adequate.
 
Well, it wasn't.  My first year was excructiatingly difficult, because I
was fumbling and stumbling  to put together a coherent program of units
with professional relevance to museum work.  The second year was a bit
better, and by the fourth year I began to feel that I was indeed offering
something both sensible and worthwhile.
 
There *is* something worthwhile in academic musuem studies, and that is a
sense of the trade overall.  I had come from the curatorial corner, history
discipline.  I found as I developed courses that I held an unbeautiful bag
of prejudices: I distrusted designers, suspected conservators, despised
dead animal curators, loathed art curators etc.  These prejudices were
grounded in experience, but they certainly shaped my world view, and I know
they are shared by many others working in museums.
 
Now I try consciously to teach a holistic view of museum business in the
hope that when my graduates find work, they will have a more charitable and
constrcutive view of the whole organisation.
 
Mind you, I'm not sure that it works.  I was cut to the quick to hear a
graduate working in registration in a big museum speak disparagingly of the
damn curators...  Where have I gone wrong?  Is my dream of professional
unity mere wishfulness?
 
To some degree, I know it is wishful.  I know from sociological studies of
organisations that at the operational end of things, people tend to
specialise and be loyal primarily to the discipline; that it's only at the
managerial end of the scale that you tend to get the wholistic view.
 
But I'm getting off the topic of the usefulness of museum degrees.  It now
seems to me that the sort of course I teach would rally be mcuh better
appreciated by people already working in museums, rather than raw
beginners.  But people already in museum jobs find that if they want to do
higher degrees, they do them in their disciplines, because that's what they
work at.
 
And so the traditional mentality that a higher degree eg a PhD should be in
a field, a discipline, remains a powerful determinant of standards.  (I'm
trapped within thei mentality myself, stumbling along on a PhD in
historical sociology, rather than, say, house museums, which is what I'm
doing research on to justify my present job).  I see there are more and
more people doing PhDs in museum studies at Leicester, but I don't know any
at work in Australia yet.  I do know that qualifications for entry level
work in museums increasingly list museum studies Grad.Dip. or MA as
desirable, though not necessary.  I guess that, as higher degrees in museum
studies become more common, they'll become more accepted, more usual.
 
I think it's probably an ok development.  You don't need a PhD in snakes or
cosmology to be a productive museum person; you need to know the scene and
be good with people.
 
 
Linda Young
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