I consider myself a bit of a lay expert when it comes to museum closures. I worked at a museum for two years before it was suddenly shuttered.
Both of those years being ones in which Donald Trump was either running for or serving as president, there were always vague rumors of funding shortfalls and possible site closures. Yet, nothing concrete was announced, no changes were asked of employees, until the museum closure was sprung upon us with just a few short weeks’ notice to clear out.
This October, after nearly two centuries, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia closed its doors. It was the first museum ever to display a dinosaur skeleton. Flurries of people visited one last time before the Academy of Natural Sciences was gone for good. Revenue was up more than 20 times this September compared to last September.
Halfway across the country, another storied institution, the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Kansas, announced that it would close by the end of 2026, only to possibly roll back the decision a week hence amid an outpouring of generosity and renewed interest from donors and community members. The Sternberg Museum may now stay open into next year, according to the Fort Hays State University officials in charge of the museum’s fate (an inquiry to the Sternberg Museum seeking a comment on this development did not receive a response).
All three of the museums I’ve mentioned generated revenue but also relied in part on some form of public funding. That is as it should be: museums are generally operated by nonprofits, and it is, of course, not the job of a nonprofit to turn a profit.
On the contrary, museums are important cultural institutions that help tell the story of our nation, our species, our planet, and ultimately, our universe. While museums do entertain the public, the entertainment is incidental to educating and informing people, some of whom will become our future scientists and historians, others of whom might simply be able to hang on to their childlike sense of wonder, thereby becoming better citizens, voters, workers, and parents.
Well, it’s probably no surprise to anyone reading this that the Trump administration doesn’t like that last part very much. “I love the poorly educated,” said Donald Trump more than 10 years ago. Trump loves poorly educated people because they have consistently proven far more susceptible to his lies over the past decade.
Not everyone has the resources to obtain a college degree, but just about everyone can set aside a Saturday and the price of a fast food meal to visit a museum. That explains why Trump is trying so hard to rewrite history at the museums he has control over and to simply defund the ones he can’t strong-arm into propagandizing their content.
Even for museums that do not directly receive federal funding, Trump still wields massive influence over his base and over state and local taxing authorities that he can bring to bear to fiscally attack his cultural enemies — those trying to make people smarter. The financial warfare the Trump administration is waging against science and history is real, and I don’t at all mean to discount its role in these recent museum closures.
Still, part of the blame lies with the ineptitude of the administrators making the decisions. When I worked at a museum, I was simultaneously the president of a different nonprofit with nearly a hundred employees that has remained perfectly solvent the entire time I’ve been on the board. If I’d known funds were really that tight at my museum, I could have pointed out a dozen ways we could’ve saved money onsite, and thought of half a dozen ideas for potential new sources of revenue. My colleagues there surely would have had experience and expertise of their own to draw on. But nobody asked us. Instead, those at the leadership level offsite acted like corporate raiders, immediately closed things down by fiat, and told us we were all laid off.
There was a whole subgenre of movies in the 1990s about this sort of thing that we can learn from. “Oh no, [insert beloved local institution] is going to close! But, what if we [insert ludicrous scheme to raise funds that somehow works out in the end in a barely believable twist]?”
The skyrocketing number of visitors to the Academy of Natural Sciences in its final month, and the possibly delayed closure of the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, both demonstrate that people are willing to step up and try to save their museums themselves if they are only given the chance. Yes, it is a challenging time to run a museum, as well as any sort of nonprofit that seeks to objectively inform the public.
But damn, if you want to close buildings and lay people off so badly, go work on Wall Street. Even though times are tough for museums, if you are someone making these decisions, it is nonetheless your duty to give your patrons, your workers, and your communities the chance to turn things around. If your instinct at the first sign of real financial distress is to suddenly and irreversibly close a museum, you probably should not be working at a nonprofit.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post Museum Closures Are Partly Due To Federal Hostility, But Also To Needless Corporatization Of Nonprofits appeared first on Above the Law.
I consider myself a bit of a lay expert when it comes to museum closures. I worked at a museum for two years before it was suddenly shuttered.
Both of those years being ones in which Donald Trump was either running for or serving as president, there were always vague rumors of funding shortfalls and possible site closures. Yet, nothing concrete was announced, no changes were asked of employees, until the museum closure was sprung upon us with just a few short weeks’ notice to clear out.
This October, after nearly two centuries, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia closed its doors. It was the first museum ever to display a dinosaur skeleton. Flurries of people visited one last time before the Academy of Natural Sciences was gone for good. Revenue was up more than 20 times this September compared to last September.
Halfway across the country, another storied institution, the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Kansas, announced that it would close by the end of 2026, only to possibly roll back the decision a week hence amid an outpouring of generosity and renewed interest from donors and community members. The Sternberg Museum may now stay open into next year, according to the Fort Hays State University officials in charge of the museum’s fate (an inquiry to the Sternberg Museum seeking a comment on this development did not receive a response).
All three of the museums I’ve mentioned generated revenue but also relied in part on some form of public funding. That is as it should be: museums are generally operated by nonprofits, and it is, of course, not the job of a nonprofit to turn a profit.
On the contrary, museums are important cultural institutions that help tell the story of our nation, our species, our planet, and ultimately, our universe. While museums do entertain the public, the entertainment is incidental to educating and informing people, some of whom will become our future scientists and historians, others of whom might simply be able to hang on to their childlike sense of wonder, thereby becoming better citizens, voters, workers, and parents.
Well, it’s probably no surprise to anyone reading this that the Trump administration doesn’t like that last part very much. “I love the poorly educated,” said Donald Trump more than 10 years ago. Trump loves poorly educated people because they have consistently proven far more susceptible to his lies over the past decade.
Not everyone has the resources to obtain a college degree, but just about everyone can set aside a Saturday and the price of a fast food meal to visit a museum. That explains why Trump is trying so hard to rewrite history at the museums he has control over and to simply defund the ones he can’t strong-arm into propagandizing their content.
Even for museums that do not directly receive federal funding, Trump still wields massive influence over his base and over state and local taxing authorities that he can bring to bear to fiscally attack his cultural enemies — those trying to make people smarter. The financial warfare the Trump administration is waging against science and history is real, and I don’t at all mean to discount its role in these recent museum closures.
Still, part of the blame lies with the ineptitude of the administrators making the decisions. When I worked at a museum, I was simultaneously the president of a different nonprofit with nearly a hundred employees that has remained perfectly solvent the entire time I’ve been on the board. If I’d known funds were really that tight at my museum, I could have pointed out a dozen ways we could’ve saved money onsite, and thought of half a dozen ideas for potential new sources of revenue. My colleagues there surely would have had experience and expertise of their own to draw on. But nobody asked us. Instead, those at the leadership level offsite acted like corporate raiders, immediately closed things down by fiat, and told us we were all laid off.
There was a whole subgenre of movies in the 1990s about this sort of thing that we can learn from. “Oh no, [insert beloved local institution] is going to close! But, what if we [insert ludicrous scheme to raise funds that somehow works out in the end in a barely believable twist]?”
The skyrocketing number of visitors to the Academy of Natural Sciences in its final month, and the possibly delayed closure of the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, both demonstrate that people are willing to step up and try to save their museums themselves if they are only given the chance. Yes, it is a challenging time to run a museum, as well as any sort of nonprofit that seeks to objectively inform the public.
But damn, if you want to close buildings and lay people off so badly, go work on Wall Street. Even though times are tough for museums, if you are someone making these decisions, it is nonetheless your duty to give your patrons, your workers, and your communities the chance to turn things around. If your instinct at the first sign of real financial distress is to suddenly and irreversibly close a museum, you probably should not be working at a nonprofit.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post Museum Closures Are Partly Due To Federal Hostility, But Also To Needless Corporatization Of Nonprofits appeared first on Above the Law.
