Matthew,
 
        No flame thrower active here, but I will disagree with the fact
that liberal arts grads need little or no exposure to the core museum
curricula: curatorship, conservation, registration, education, exhibit
design and administration. Without them, it is like telling a person they
can enter the professional history field WITHOUT courses in historiography.
 
Yes, there are hundreds of museum grads out there - all competing for
salaries that average in the $20ks when a good executive secretary will be
paid $35,000. When this started to happen in libraries, the MLS standard
was imposed before (insert sarcasm here) undocumented workers were hired as
librarians because they worked cheap.
 
        I am firmly in favor of liberal arts educations, but without a core
of basic training we will see the field regress, lose our grip on the
elemental aspects of the field, and be a "cheap labor" field. Retraining is
a pain in the !@% for people who have been in the field for years, but we
all have to continue to learn.  With some sort of basic competency norm for
curators, educators and administrators (I am not suggesting testing) I
think we could begin to see parity with professions such as teachers and
librarians. They both reluctantly recognized the problems of NOT having an
accepted standard of competency. The old joke "what is the only profession
paid lower than a school teacher? A museum profesional" will become true if
the field is intellectually devalued.
 
__________
Byron A. Johnson
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