To date I've been interested in the almost parallel and overlapping
conversations about (1) a comparison between libraries and museums and
their staffs and (2) what would make an appropriate "constructed" museum
studies program for a prospective professional.  I find connections in
comparing who teaches in most of the museum studies programs around
the country, compared to who teaches library science graduate
students.
Almost every single program in the professional training directory
put out a couple of years ago by AAM is taught by either (1) university
museum/gallery staff on parttime teaching appointment, (2) art history
faculty who know the visual art but not necessarily the institutional
contexts (the same concept applies here to history, natural history, etc.)
or (3) by parttime adjunct faculty recruited from area museums.  While such
frontline perspective is obviously important, it is rarely being balanced by
fulltime faculty who are explicitly trained in museum studies and who can
develop courses dealing with historical, political, social contexts of museums.
Library science education programs, on the other hand, are taught by fulltime
faculty, usually with doctoral degrees in the field or information systems or
such.
One of the critical marks by which a career field is recognized as a
"profession" is that it possesses and controls a corner of
theoretically-founded, rationally organized knowledge, and that some kind of
formal training is required to understand that information.  Because
"profession" is also an honorific term, there are other connotations, as well,
but I believe our professional training programs give short shrift to anything
that is not that anecdotal, "from the trenches" perspective.  I believe that
the next generation of practitioners in our museums need understanding that
can be passed on by reflective, informed practitioners, AS WELL AS from
sociologists, communications theorists, management theorists, historians,
and anthropologists of contemporary society so that these twenty-first century
administrators, educators, curators and conservators, etc., will understand
what's going on around them and their future institutions.
I vent my spleen on this issue because, after twelve years in museum
fundraising and occasional lectures to classes in museum studies and arts
administration, I went back for a doctoral degree so that I could be a better
scholar and teacher of future practitioners, and now I suspect that most
museum studies programs really don't have the institutional resources or the
interest in finding a fulltime "scholar" in the field.  According to some of
the folks in the AAM's Professional Training standing committee, my
opportunities for teaching are evidently going to be much better in my
"official" doctoral department than they are in any museum studies program,
unless I want to obtain a university art museum staff job that provides an
opportunity for teaching a course or so every year.
 
Richard Perry
University of California, San Diego
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