Benton, Thomas H.

English

Biodiversity Informatics

Sometimes I wonder whether I have chosen the wrong pro-fession. How many English professors, after all, have a 6-foot-long reproduction of Rudolph Zallinger’s “The Age ofReptiles” mural from Yale’s Peabody Museum hanging in theirhome office above cabinets full of fossils, butterflies, andseashells? As a child, I was, like many kids, fascinated bydinosaurs. One of my most powerful early memories is of visit-ing the great hall of Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences:an enormous 19th-century gallery decorated, as I recall, withwrought iron, entablatures, oak, and marble. I remember myfootsteps echoing as I walked toward the polished railing behindwhich stood the Hadrosaurus, more than 20 feet tall and impos-sibly ancient. The mounted skeleton — brown, lacquered, andcrackled, like a Rembrandt painting — revealed itself graduallyas my eyes adjusted to the light. Dinosaur Hall was a templededicated to the wonder of creation, the aspirations of science,and the smallness of humanity in the context of geologic time.I kept that faith, earning top grades in science courses, untilmy junior year of high school, when the rigors of trigonometryand physics — the empirical fetish — more or less put an endto my scientific ambitions, if not to my love of science. It sur-prises some people when I say that the closest cousin to science,for me, was English, because it, too, was about the cultivationof wonder and imagination.Nowadays, when a scholarly conference brings me toPhiladelphia, New York, Chicago, or Washington, I try to makea trip to their natural-history museums. But I rarely find what Iam looking for. I suppose I am trying to relive my childhood. Iknow the past is easy to glorify, but I do not think my disap-pointment comes only from my tendency toward nostalgia andold-fogeyism. I think natural-history museums have changed forthe worse in the last 30 years. The solitude, silence, and quasi-religious awe that I remember have been banished by throngs ofscreaming, barely supervised children on school trips, who payless attention to the exhibits than they do to the gift shops andfood courts. No doubt, the museums were forced into that sit-uation by economic necessity and political demands that theycater to the broadest possible segment of the public. That meansmuseums simplify their exhibitions rather than expect visitors toaspire to a higher level of appreciation for something outside thenormal range of experience.I remember, even as a 10-year-old, not liking the new chil-dren’s annexes that were first installed back in the 70s. I felt a lit-tle insulted, as if I was being made to watch Sesame Street, orspend time in a day-care center. Clearly, these “Please Touch”museums have to cater to a wide age range, but, just as it oftendoes in the classroom, that seems to mean aiming at an ever-lowering median of knowledge, interest, and common civility.My 7-year-old daughter also loves natural history. She likesbeing able to handle real fossils and touch exotic animals, butshe does not like being crowded and trampled by other childrenwho often reduce museums to something approximating life inthe Hobbesian state of nature. So we have learned to avoid theso-called children’s sections, even though the behavior theyencourage seems to have spilled out to the rest of the museum.Unfortunately, the Academy of Natural Sciences was a vic-tim of the imperialism of the juvenile back in the mid-80s.Dinosaur Hall, no longer a chapel, is now brightly lit andpainted in “kid-friendly” colors. The architectural details areconcealed beneath wall-to-wall carpeting and plaster board.IGUANA  •  VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2008 175COMMENTARIESThe Decline of the Natural-History Museum1Thomas H. Benton2The Barosaurus at the American Museum of Natural History, rearingup and defending its young from an advancing Allosaurus, is perhapsthe greatest mounted dinosaur exhibit in the world.1 Copyright © 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprintedwith permission.2 Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of an associate professor ofEnglish at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes about aca-demic culture and welcomes reader mail directed to his attentionat careers@chronicle.com.Iguana 15.3 b&w text  9/10/08  5:44 AM  Page 175Toward the back of the hall, a dated “high tech” video installa-tion inserts kids into a picture with dinosaurs in it, as if theywere starring in Jurassic Park, a movie that today’s children areno more likely to have seen than the old TV show, Land of theLost. The kids make ugly faces and dance while watching them-selves on screen until the next group comes in and shoves themout.Never mind that Dinosaur Hall was one of the mostimportant sites in the institutional history of paleontology.Discovered in 1858, the academy’s Hadrosaurus was the firstmounted dinosaur skeleton in the world. Dinomania started inPhiladelphia. Now the towering Hadrosaurus is hunched over —in deference to current theory — and banished to an inconspic-uous corner to make room for a gathering of fossil replicasdesigned as photo-ops. Instead of gazing up at a relic of theheroic era of Victorian science, people ignore the Hadrosaurusand get their picture taken with their head beneath the jaws ofthe scary Giganotosaurus, a sort of Tyrannosaurus rex on steroids,before going to the gift shop to buy a “sharp toothed” plush toy.See, kids, science can be fun!But programmed “fun” is not necessarily pleasure, nor isentertainment the only means of sparking an interest in science.The people who run museums these days seem to think thatchildren cannot enjoy quiet reflection. I suppose they think thatwould be elitist. As a result, decorum — once one of the key les-sons of the museum for children — is replaced by the rules ofthe schoolyard, the serious is usurped by the cute, and thoughtis banished by the chatter of last decade’s high-tech gizmos.In Stuffed Animals & Pickled Heads: The Culture andEvolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford, 2001), StephenT. Asma quoted one curator from the Field Museum inChicago: “The sad fact is that many quieter people, who put inyears of good work at the Field Museum, have recently lost theirjobs to more dynamic but less educated competitors. The natureof the work, hunched over tiny bugs or fossils in a hidden-awaycubicle, for example, traditionally drew introverts to the curatorand staff jobs. And the museum nurtured them.” Instead, thecurator laments that “the current trend is for museum trusteesand administrators to ignore the internal, albeit quirky, talentwhen staffing positions of power and go outside for M.B.A.’swho frequently don’t know anything about the nuances of thesubject matter.”Fortunately, it is still possible in some of the larger muse-ums and the more obscure ones to find older exhibits — silentcorridors of glass cases filled with specimens — that have notbeen ruined by the addition of push-button TV sets, cuddlymascots, and other contemporary affectations. In particular, Ienjoy the animal dioramas created from the 1920s through the1940s. Those are not mere scientific displays; they are amongthe most interesting and underrated art works of the 20th cen-tury. Some of them are the three-dimensional equivalents ofAudubon’s Birds of America. Successful museum installationsneed not always require huge expenditures for blockbusterattractions like the Field Museum’s $8-million T-rex, “Sue,” themost expensive fossil in the world (the conspicuous cost beingthe real attraction).I remember that the second-best thing about the Academyof Natural Sciences, back in the 70s, was something called the“Trading Post.” It was a large display counter full of rocks, fos-sils, and bones. Kids could bring in specimens from their owncollections and trade them for something new. I once broughtin a box of ordinary seashells from the Jersey shore andexchanged them for two skulls: a cat and a rabbit, as I recall. TheTrading Post always gave kids the better end of the bargain, andit kept me exploring the creeks and vacant lots in my neighbor-hood, discovering that nature even existed inside the city. (Thosespecimens are still in my cabinets, and my daughters are start-ing to add their own findings to the collection.)There are also a few museums that have been preserved bybenign neglect, such as the Wagner Free Institute of Science, alsoin Philadelphia, and the Harvard Museum of Natural History.And, I think, foremost in the United States, the AmericanMuseum of Natural History in New York has preserved,expanded, and updated itself without sacrificing too much of itshistory and grandeur.In the American Museum, for example, the curators tookthe risk of having their enormous Barosaurus rear up, with itshead 50 feet in the air, defending its young from an advancingAllosaurus. Set amid the marble columns of Roosevelt MemorialHall, the display is awe-inspiring, perhaps the greatest mounteddinosaur in the world. The museum’s Barosaurus is probably badscience, but it is also an important work of public art thatexpresses the obligations of one generation to another in amedium that a child can appreciate as well as an adult.Natural-history museums are not just about science. Whycouldn’t the academy in Philadelphia leave Dinosaur Hall alone?Were the memories associated with that setting not worth any-thing to the curators? No doubt for the hard pressed natural-his-tory museum, an alliance between science and business — i.e.,entertainment, tourism, and merchandising — seems more sus-tainable than the old linkage between science and the humani-ties — i.e., art, history, and even religion, and their combinedpower to cultivate wonder and imagination.On the other hand, I do admire the efforts of many natu-ral-history museums — in particular, the American Museum inNew York and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museumof Natural History in Washington — to challenge their visitors,to stand up against the pressure to expunge evolution, and todefend the ideas that led to their founding.If museums could keep in the foreground their complex,contentious, and interdisciplinary histories — while avoidingthe tendency to turn themselves into theme parks and shoppingmalls — they might rediscover a way to honor the past andembrace the complexity of science as a social institution in amanner that respects the intelligence of visitors, old and young,from every kind of background. In the process, they might makesome political enemies, jeopardize some corporate donations,and sell fewer plush toys. They might also demand more fromtheir current audience of captive schoolchildren. And that mightbe a good thing, if they aren’t bankrupted in the process.From the perspective of a long-time lover of natural history,it’s a risk worth taking.176 IGUANA  •  VOLUME 15, NUMBER 3  •  SEPTEMBER 2008 COMMENTARIESIguana 15.3 b&w text  9/10/08  5:44 AM  Page 176

The Decline of the Natural-History Museum

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The Decline of the Natural-History Museum

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