In a message dated 99-11-10 13:51:28 EST, Bob Martino wrote:

<< To say that your only two options are to either completely accept
 everything as it is now or to simply get out of the field altogether is
 doing a tremendous disservice to a lot of professional, talented, dedicated
 people.  >>

I agree essentially with his message.  But it prompts me to articulate
something I've had in the back of my mind through most of the discussions
about volunteering in order to gain experience and/or to get a foot in the
door for a museum job and the complaints I've seen about lack of job
opportunities in museums, with their implicit and explicit assumptions that
this situation is somehow the museums' fault.  Folks, some fields are simply
overcrowded and sooner or later you have to accept that fact and stop whining.

When I got into the museum profession many, many years ago, it was not
overcrowded.  At the time I took the job I was the sole applicant; a few
others had interviewed for it some months earlier, I believe, and simply had
not inspired the boss; when I came along, I was snapped up immediately.  But
I was a refugee from an overcrowded field, photography, along with my fellow
graduates, most of whom knew we were not likely to land jobs in either
commercial photography or to become financially successful--or even
viable--as artists.  Most of us were ready to take a shot at our first love,
then be prepared to move into a related field or an entirely different one if
it proved necessary.  Some moved into teaching photography, I got a museum
job working with photographic collections, and others left the field entirely.

For a long time I was only dimly aware of the burgeoning museum studies field
and the surplus of applicants for the limited number of openings--despite the
surge of new museums popping up everywhere--that it was creating.  It seems
to me that this is a disservice, and I don't think that it is the museums
which perform a disservice by accepting, essentially as apprentices, people
willing to take unpaid internships and volunteer positions in order to make
themselves more visible when a few positions do become available.  It's just
a whole new ball game than when I started.

The nature of many museums and the way they do their jobs has changed
radically, I assume partly as a response to the museum theory which is being
taught, the new emphases on marketing, education, and the other areas which
many of us old-timers would have--and probably still do--consider peripheral
to the real work of museums.  The fear I often heard expressed by my more
curmudgeonly curatorial colleagues in the late 60s, that education
departments would "take over" the museums ,has probably occurred in many
quarters.  Yet the job opportunities which that shift created hasn't and
probably can't keep pace with the oversupply of qualified applicants.  What
to do?

I have a radical suggestion.  To the extent that many people who comprise
this glut on the market consider themselves primarily educators, it seems to
me that there are many job opportunities in related fields.  There is, for
example, a severe shortage of qualified teachers!  Education, it seems to me,
can and should occur in classrooms, not only in museums.  While the
possibilities for innovative, proactive "education" in a museum setting seem
more glamourous than traditional classroom roles, it is tragic and ironic
that more dedicated, intelligent professional educators don't enter the field
of education per se.

Ironically, my second career choice after photography would have been college
teaching in the history of photography, but I waited too long to try it.  At
first there were few opportunities in that field, then the photography boom
in academia occurred in the 1970s, and that field also became overcrowded.
Although I have been a short-term visiting professor of photography
occasionally, I could not find a full-time position now because there are too
many better qualified scholars available.  So I stay put in a museum,
somewhat overworked, and all too seldom able to concentrate on the research
I'd really like to pursue.

I'm digressing now, but perhaps I've offered a little food for thought.
Sooner or later, you need a salary, and you need to be flexible enough to go
where the jobs are if your first choice doesn't work out.

David Haberstich

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