More on Small and governance at the Smithsonian from the Wall Street Journal:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110009863
Small Departure, Large Problem
The Smithsonian Institution needs an entirely new modus operandi.
BY ERIC GIBSON
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
The only surprise in Monday's news that Smithsonian Institution Secretary
Lawrence M. Small had resigned is that it hadn't happened sooner.
The reason for Mr. Small's departure was the fallout on Capitol Hill from an
inspector general's report that showed him billing the Smithsonian for such
lavish expenses as first-class air travel and home maintenance costs--albeit
with the approval of the Board of Regents, the Smithsonian's governing body.
Mr. Small might have weathered this storm as he had others during his
seven-year tenure were it not for threats by Sen. Charles Grassley (R.,
Iowa) and others on the Hill to freeze a $17 million increase in the
Smithsonian's 2008 budget unless Mr. Small's office changed its ways.
Mr. Small, who came to the Smithsonian from Fannie Mae after many years at
Citibank, has opened two new museums, renovated two others and raised about
$1 billion.
Yet for much of his tenure, it seemed he could not get out of bed without
igniting some controversy. Early on he caused an uproar by promising big
donors control over the way their monetary gifts were used, thus blurring
the traditional church-state boundary between fund raising and programming.
He allowed General Motors and other corporations to muddy the distinction
between sponsorship and commercial advertising. He installed as head of the
renovated National Portrait Gallery not an art historian but cultural
historian Marc Pachter, who blithely admitted to Lee Rosenbaum, for an
article on this page, that "I personally don't do brushstrokes."
Things weren't much better outside the Smithsonian, where Mr. Small's
personal life repeatedly cast a pall over the institution. In 2004 he was
convicted of buying art containing feathers from birds on the Endangered
Species list, and then got into a tussle with the judge on what form his
community-service sentence should take. Last year, a government report
implicated him in the Fannie Mae scandal.
So now the Smithsonian must search for a replacement. Early reports that
Sheila P. Burke, a former political operative (she was once Sen. Robert
Dole's chief of staff) and currently the Smithsonian's chief operating
officer, is a serious contender for the post are not reassuring. The
Smithsonian doesn't need another leader from outside the world of the arts
and sciences and unfamiliar with the unique culture of the nonprofit world.
What's called for now is a figure in the mold of the Carnegie Endowment's
Vartan Gregorian, who in stints running Brown University and (most famously)
the New York Public Library showed that it is possible to raise money and
maintain an institution while keeping faith with the values it embodies.
But overdue as it was, Mr. Small's departure will amount to very little
unless it becomes an occasion to address some longstanding problems. The
first is the Smithsonian's governance.
As the preceding résumé shows, the Board of Regents should have picked up on
plenty of warning signs that Mr. Small was more of a liability than an
asset. Or was he? Whatever his failings as an administrator, he certainly
knew how to raise money, and it's hard to escape the conclusion that as long
as Mr. Small kept the checks coming in, the Regents were only too willing to
look the other way. At least until his actions threatened the support of the
Smithsonian's primary source of funding: Capitol Hill.
More fundamentally, there is the Smithsonian's governing structure itself.
The Board of Regents is headed by the chief justice and includes the vice
president and assorted members of Congress along with a number of private
citizens. Whatever luster these public officials add to the Smithsonian's
letterhead, it's unrealistic to expect them to exercise meaningful oversight
given their other responsibilities. (Oh, to have seen Chief Justice
Roberts's expression when he learned that, besides running an entire branch
of government, he was responsible for 18 museums and research facilities,
plus a zoo.)
Beyond governance, the Smithsonian's entire basis of operations needs
review. At the moment, Congress provides some 70% of its roughly $1 billion
annual budget, with the institution itself responsible for the rest. That
may be an enviable figure to some (public largess to most cultural
institutions amounts to far less), but it so limits the Smithsonian's other
revenue-raising options that it's like wearing golden handcuffs. Close the
gap by charging admission like other museums? Out of the question, says
Congress. Visitors have already paid admission with their taxes. One
previous secretary who floated that idea was warned that for every penny the
institution took in at the gate, Congress would dock its appropriation
accordingly.
This is the financial environment Mr. Small was forced to operate in. You
can criticize his fund-raising methods, his often skewed sense of priorities
and his insensitivity to the intellectual culture of the Smithsonian. But
under the circumstances, what choice did he have other than to aggressively
cultivate private and corporate donors?
The Smithsonian doesn't just need a new secretary. It needs an entirely new
modus operandi.
Mr. Gibson is The Wall Street Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor.
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