David and others:

I have wavered back and forth over this issue, and as of recently, have
stood on both sides.  As a curator-type, I deplored the recent trend of
hiring <gasp> business types to run a museum, and all that this brings with
it:  name changes (Denver Museum of Nature and Science?? Since when is
"Nature" a separate thing from "Science"? and why change a familiar name and
it's attendant acronym? DMNH is firmly entrenched in the scientific
literature), changes on emphasis away from natural history and toward
technology sciences, and the emphasis on the bottom line.

Now, as a Director-type, I'm painfully aware that the collections, and our
educational mission, are ephemeral.  Yes, ephemeral....they can, and will
disappear if we don't keep the doors open.  And it takes revenue to do so.
The bottom line is critical.  Who do we think is going to fund our
activities?  All the righteous indignation in the world won't force the
government, the public, or donors, at any level, to give us what WE think we
should have.  And is it, as a philosophical point, the governments job to
fund us?  Perhaps, if the public doesn't see that we have a value, we don't
have much justification for our existence?

My parent organization had pumped almost $300,000.00 a year into our museum
budget.  This has ended.  I now am faced with cutting more than 1/3 of my
budget, and operating at a 0 deficit for 2002.  I'm perhaps fortunate, in
that I already was covering more than 70% of my operating expenses with
revenue.  So most of what we do will continue, and I'm going to keep all of
our positions filled.  I can spend the next 3 months complaining to Board
members, the media and anyone who will listen about this deplorable
situation, or I can spend the time figuring out how to do the most with what
I've got, and where to raise funds to do more.  I choose the later.

We're fortunate here, in that I will not have to lay anyone off.  But I WILL
be running this as a business.  The bottom line is the critical measure.  My
staff, a good group of dedicated people, will do more with less.  In an
ideal world, every taxpayer would understand the value of museums.  But this
is not an ideal world, and never will be.  We are competing for support, and
we either compete in today's game, with today's rules, or we lose.

Arguments about the value of collections and the value of museums are beside
the point.  First, we already all agree with those ideas.  Second, it isn't
we few in the museum world who really determine the value of what we do.  It
is the people as a whole, or at least those people we can reach and convince
to support us.  Demanding support, and "understanding" from administrators
is one sided.  Until WE make an effort to contribute to the bottom line,
through grants, better exhibits, more efficient operations, etc, we have no
right to demand that administrators accommodate us unilaterally.

Note careful here that I am not advocating abandoning efforts to improve our
support from local, state and federal dollars, and to work with
administrators with no museum or science background to keep us adequately
funded.  We need to do a much better job in moving ourselves toward a
business mentality, if we expect the business types who increasingly are in
charge to move toward a museum mentality.

Richard White, Director
International Wildlife Museum

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