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‘Chapter 3: Strategy and Ettectiveness
Visitors to the campus were always shown the University
‘Ar Museum, of which the large and distinguished univer-
sity was very proud. A photograph of the handsome nei
classical building that housed the museum had long been
used by the university for the cover of its brochures and
caval
The building, together with a substantial endowment,
was given to the university around 1929 by an alumnus,
the son of the university's first president, who had become
very wealthy as an investment banker. He also gave the uni
versity his own small, but high-quality, collections—one of
Teruscan figurines, and one, wtique in America, of English
pre-Raphaelite paintings. He then served as the museum's
unpaid director until his death. During hs tenure he brought
2a few additional collections tw the museum, largely from
other alumni of the university. Only rarely did the museum
ppurchase anything. As a result, the museum housed several
small collections of uneven quality. As long as the founder
fan the museum, none ofthe collections was ever shown to
anybody except a few members of the university's art history
faculty, who were adit as ic founder's private guest
After the founder's death, in the mid-1940s, the
university intended to bring in @ professional museum di
rector. Indeed, this had been past of the agreement under
which the founder had given the museum, A search com-
mittee was to be appointed, but in the meantime a gradu:
ave student in art history, who had shows interest in the
‘museum and who had spent a good many hours in it, took
lover temporarily. At frst, Miss Kickoff did not even have
tie, let alone @ salary. She stayea vu acing, as the muse
tum’s director, and over the next 30 years was promoted in
stages to that ttle. But from the frst day, whatever her t
tl
he was in charge. She immediately st abuut changing
the museum altogether. She cataloged the collections. She
Pursued new gifts, again primarily small collections from
alumni and other friends of the university. She organized
fund raising for the museum, but above all she began to
ineegrate the museum into the work of the university
When a space problem arose due to increased enol:
ments and the addition of new professors, Miss Kirkoff
offered the third floor of the museum to the art history
faculty, which moved ite offices there, She remodeled the
building to include classrooms and a modern and well
Appointed auditorium. She raised funds to build one of the
best research and referen.
country. She also began to organize a series of special exhi-
bitions buile around one of the museum's own collections,
‘omplemented by loans from outside collections. For each
Of these exhibitions, she had a distinguished member of
the university's art faculty write a catalog, These catalogs
Speedy hecame the leading scholarly texts in the fields
libraries in ast history it he
Miss Kirkoff ran the University Art Museum for almost
half a century. At the age of 68, after suffering a severe
stroke, she had to retire. In her letter of resignation she
proudly pointed to the museum’s growth and accomplish:
‘ment under her stewardship. “Our endowment,” she wrote,
}0W compares favorably with museums several times our
size. We never have had to ask the university for any money
other than our share of the university's insurance policies,
(Our collections in the areas of our strength, while small, are
of first-rate quality and importance. Above all, we are be-
ing used by more people than any museum of our size. Out
lecture series, in which members of the university's art his
tory faculty present a major subject to a university audience
of students and faculty, attracts regularly 300 t0 500 peo-
ple; and if we had the seating capacity, we could easily have
a larger audience. Our exhibitions are seen and studied by
‘more visitors, most of them members of the university com-
‘munity, than all but the most highly publicized exhibitions
in the very big museums ever draw. Above all, the courses
and seminars offered in the museum have become one of
‘the most popular and most rapidly growing educational
features of the university. No other museum in this country
or anywhere else,” concluded Miss Kirkoff, “has so suc
cessfully integrated art into the life of a major university
and a major university into the work of a museum.”
Miss Kirkoff strongly recommended that the university
bring in a professional museum director as her successor.
“The museum is much too big and much too important
to be entrusted to another amateur such as I was 45 years
ago,” she wrote. “And it needs careful thinking regarding,
its direction, its basis of support, and its future relationship
with the university.”
The university took Miss Kirkotf’s advice, A search
committee was duly appointed and, after one year’s work,
it produced a candidate whom everybody approved. The
candidate was himself a graduate of the university who
had then obtained his Ph.D. in att history and in museum
work from the university. Both his teaching and his admin.
istrative record were sound, leading to his current muscum
directorship in a medium-sized city. There he converted an
old, well-known, but rather sleepy museum into a lively,
community-oriented museum whose exhibitions were well
Publicized and attracted large crowds,
The new museum director took over with great fanfare
In September 1998. Less than three years later he left-—
with less fanfare, but still with considerable noise. Whether
he resigned or was fired was not quite clear. But that there
owas biterness on both sides was only too obvious.
The new director, upon his arrival, had announced
that he looked upon the museum as a “major community
resuurce” and intended to “make the tremendous artisticand scholarly resources of the museum fully available to
the academic community as w ic.” When
terview with the college news-
paper, everybody nodded in approval. It soon became
that what he n
ell as co the pul
he said these things in an
‘community resource” and
the faculty and students understood by these words
not the same. The museum had always been “open
to the public” but, in practice, it was members of the col-
lege community who used the museum and attenided its
lectures, its exhibitions, and its frequent semina
The first thing the new ditector did, however, was to
promote visits from the public schools in the area. He soon
began to change the exhibition policy. Instead of orga
small shows, focused on @ major collection of t
izing
and built around a scholarly catalog, he began to organize
“popular exhibitions” around “topics of general interest”
such as “Women Artists through the Ages.” He promoted
these exhibitions vigorously inthe newspapers, in radio and
\clevision interviews, and, above all, in the local schools.
AS a result, what had been a busy but quiet place was
soon knee-deep with schoolchildren, taken to the museum
in special buses that cluttered the access roads around the
museum and throughout the campus. The faculty, which
was not particularly happy with the resulting noise and
confusion, became thoroughly upset when the scholarly
old chairman of the art history department was mobbed by
fourth graders who sprayed him with their water pistols as
he tried to
fa his way through che main hall to his office.
singly, the new director did not design his own
shows, but brought in traveling exhibitions from major
museums, importing their catalog a
his own faculty produce one
The students, too, were apparently une
the firs gic or eight months, during which ¢
had been somewhat of a camy
classes and seminars held at
as did ateendan:
rather than have
thusiastic after
he new directo
s hero. Attendance at the
e art museum fell off sharply,
at the evening lectures. When the editor
of the campus newspaper interviewed students for a story
fon the museum, he was told again and again that the mu-
seum had become too
dents to €
visy and too “sensational” for stu
lasses and to have a chance to lear.
What brought all this to a head was an Islamic art ex
hibit in late 2000, Since the museum had lite Islamic art, no
body criticized the showing of a traveling exhibit, offered on
very advantageous terms with generous financial assistance
from some of the Arab governments. But then, instead of in-
viting one of the university’s own faculty members to deliver
we customary talk atthe opening ofthe exhibit, the
brought ina cultural attaché of one ofthe Arab einbasses in
‘Washington. A week late, the university senate decided to
appoint an advisory committe, drawn mostly from members
of the art history faculty, which, in the future, would have
to approve all plans for exhibits and lectures. The direc
tor thereupon, in an interview with the campus newspaper,
sharply attacked the faculty a¢ aliier® and “enab
Part 2: Organizational Strategy and Structure
as believing that “art belongs to the rich.” Six months laer,
in June 2001, his resignation was announced,
Under the bylaws of che university, the academic sen:
ate appoints a search committee. Normally, this is pure
formality, The chairperson of the appropriate department
submits the department's nominees for the committee who
are approved and appointed, usually without debate. But
when the academic senate early the following semester was
asked ro appoint the search committee, things were far
from “normal.” The dean who presided, sensing the tem.
pers in the room, tried to smooth over things by saying,
“Clearly, we picked the wrong person the last time. We
will have to try very hard to find the right one this time.”
He was immediately interrupted by an economist,
known for his populism, who broke in and said “I admit chat
the late director was probably not the right personality. But
strongly believe that his personality was not a the root of
problem. He tried to do what needs doing, and this got him
in trouble with the faculty. Hie tried to make our museum a
‘community resource, to bring in the community and to make
art accessible to broad masses of people, to African Ameri
cans and Hispanics, to the kids from the ghetto schools and
‘olay public. And this is what we really resented, Maybe his
‘methods were not the most tactful ones—I admit I could have
done without those interviews he gave. But what he tried to
ddo was right. We had better commit ourselves to the policy
hhe wanted to put into effec, or else we will have deserved his
attacks on us as ‘elitist’ and “snobbish,”
“This is nonsense,” cut in the usually silent and polite
senate member from the art history faculty. “It makes ab-
solutely no sense for our museum to become the kind of
nd my distinguished
colleague want it to be. Firs, there is no need. The city has
one of the world’s finest and biggest museums, and it does
exactly that and does it very well. Secondly, we have nei
ther the artistic resources nor the financial resources to serve
the community at large. We can do something different but
equally important and indeed unique. Ours isthe only mu:
seum in the country, and perhaps in the world, that is fully
integrated with a
community resource our late director a
academic community and truly a teaching
institution. We are using it, or at least we used to until the
last few unfortunate years, as a major educational resource
for all our students. No other museum in the country, and as
far as I know in the world, is bringing undergraduates into
are the way we do. All of us, in addition o our scholarly and
graduate work, tach undergraduate courses for people who
are not going to be art majors or art historians. We work
with the engineering students and show them what we do in
our conservation and restoration work, We work with archi
tecture students and show them the development of architec-
ture through the ages. Above all, we work with liberal arts
students, who often have had no exposure to art before they
came here and who enjoy our courses all the more because
they are scholarly and not just ‘art appreciation.’ This is
vanigue and this is what wus suuseun cat do and should do,1: Strategy and Effectiveness
sj doubs that cis is really what we should be doing,”
1e chairman of the mathematics department.
as far as I know, is part of the graduate fac
‘concentrate on training art historians in its
ommented th
The museum
ily. It should
PhD. program, 0
Baal wre tho the mosrom be considered an
ea adete and epi to PRD. cation, con-
Bae tis work, and stay ovt of all atempes be
Fae thon campus and ouside oft The glory of
Fame iris eh scholarly cxtalogs produced by our fac-
Baur PhD, graduates who are ough afer by art
a lis troughout the county. Tiss the muse
a sgn ich can only be impaired by the atempss
aaene whether wk stadens orth the public”
Mite dean ul eying co pacity, “Bur think cis can
i esl we know who the new director going be
Bs coal rae thes goers wih im
AY 'bep odie, Me. Dean” said one ofthe elder
mn its scholarly work, and on its research.
atesmen of the faculty.
Larisa Harrison grimaced as she tossed her company’s
Jatest quarterly eaenings onto the desk. When sales at
Virginia-based Covington Corrugated Parts & Services
urged past the §10 million mark some time back, Larisa
was certain the company was well positioned for steady
growth. Today Covington, which provides precision ma
thine parts and service to the domestic corrugated box and
paperboard industry, still enjoys a dominant market share,
but sales and profits are showing cleat signs of stagnation.
More than two decades ago, Larisa’s grandfather loaned
heer the money to star the business and then handed over the
bam on what had been the family’s Shenandoah Valley farm
to serve as her first factory. He had been a progressive thinker
‘compar
idea of woman running a machine parts plant, and he saw 00
reason why a smart, ambitious 27-year-old woman couldn't
run anything she wanted to. His old-fashioned friends no lon
fer scoffed when Larisa became one of the major employers
in the local area, Today, Covington operates from a 50,000
eat 181 just few miles from that
to many of his contemporaries who scoffed at the
square-foot factory loc
old family barn, The business allowed Larisa to realize what
Inad once seemed an almost impossible goal: She was making
8 good living without having to leave her close-knit extended
family and rural roots. She also felt a sense of satisfaction at
‘employing about 150 people, many of them neighbors. They
‘were among the most hard-working, loyal workers you'd find
anywhere, However, many of her original employees were
now nearing reticement, Replacing those skilled workers was
toing ro be dificul, she realized [tun eapesience. The area's
more likely t
brightest and best young people were
I discussed this question with an old friend and neighbor
of mine in the country, the director of one of t
igreat museums. He said to me: ‘You do not have a per-
Sonality problem; you have a management problem. You
have nor, as a university, taken responsibility for the mis
sion, the direction, and the objectives of your museum. Un-
til you do this, no director can succeed. And this is your
nnot hope to get a good director
decision. In fact, y
‘until you ean tell chat person wh.
are, If your late director is to blame—I know him and I
know that he is abrasive—it is for being willing to take on
a job when you, the university, had not faced up to the ba-
sic management decisions. There is no point talking about
who should manage until tis clear what itis that has to
managed and for what."”
‘At this point the dean realized
the discussion unless he wanted the meeting to dege
fate into a brawl, But he also realized that he had to iden:
tify the issues and possible decisions before the next senate
meeting a month later.
your basic obj
he had to adjourn
5 Covington Corrugated Parts & Services
move away in search of employment than their parents had
been. Those wlio remained behind just didn't seem vo have th
work ethic Latisa had come to expect in her employees.
Other problems were looming as well. Covington’s
market share, once at a formidable 70 percent, was slip
ping fast, brought about not only by the emergence of new
direct competitors but also by changes in the industry. The
box and paperboard industry had never ularly
recession resistant, with demand fluctuating wich manu-
‘ating output. The rocky economy had hurt the whole
industry, including Covington’s largest customers. Added
to that, alternative shipping products, such as flexible
plastic films and reusable plastic containers, were
ing more prevalent. It remained to be seen how much
a deat they'd make in the demand for boxes and paper-
board. Even more worrying, consolidation in the industry
had wiped out hundreds of the smaller U.S. plants th
Covington once served, with many of the survivors either
opening overseas facilities or entering into joint ventures
abroad. The surviving manufacturers were investing i
higher quality machines from Germany that broke di
less frequently, thus requiring fewer of Covington’s parts.
Covington was clearly ata crossroads, and its manag
ers were arguing about which direction the company should
take, If Covington wanted to grow, business as usual wasn’t
going to work. But n6 one could seem to agree on the best
‘way 10 achieve growth. The marketing manager was push
ing for moving into new products and services, perhaps
teven serving other industries, while the director of financ
lieved the plant needed to become more efficient, even Ia