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 [log in to unmask]