By David Thelen
This article was published in Museum News, May/June 2001.
Providence, R.I.; Tampa, Fla.; Los Angeles; Detroit; Wichita, Kans.; and Bellingham, Wash. For the past 10 months, the people involved with AAM’s Museums and Community Initiative have traveled to these six cities across the country, convening meetings with museums and community leaders. Educators, elected officials, business people, social service professionals, and community activists have gathered with museum professionals to ask and help to answer some fundamental questions about the nature of the museum and its civic role. Can the museum take a place at the heart of its community? Can community be at the heart of the museum’s mission and its daily operations? What does it mean to be “civically engaged”? Historian and author David Thelen, was asked by AAM to attend and critique these meetings or “dialogues.” After observing in Los Angeles and Tampa, he offers here some insightful comments about the promise and the problems of creating—or more accurately, co-creating—the civic museum.
We are living at a time when museums and other meaning-making institutions of popular education and culture are re-considering their civic missions and practices, the places they seek, the ways they engage new partners and audiences, and, therefore, their priorities. Many believe that the health of these institutions depends on becoming more civically engaged with a range of communities. Coming at a time when museums have become more visible, popular, and trusted institutions even as their resources are torn between competing missions, this attempt to define and engage “community” can be seen as a very significant and timely development. It has great potential to help museums recognize and take advantage of possibilities for building partnerships with community-based organizations and to identify both external and internal challenges that accompany these partnerships. In addition to educating museums, the initiative might help community-based organizations recognize museums as potential partners.
The issue of community and the roles of museums therein will serve to introduce museums to the debates being conducted by other civic institutions addressing many similar issues, in which managers, funders, scholars, and activists are exploring and discussing theory and practice. These debates are about civic empowerment and they center on issues of how and where citizens seek and engage each other, about their senses of power, trust, and agency. These debates are fundamentally about the terrain that can be imagined, constructed, fought over, and learned from when museums encounter community-based organizations and their constituents. From these debates, museums not only can learn what comparable institutions are learning from similar initiatives but, perhaps more important, they can gain more clarity about the priorities and civic implications involved. The immediate need is not to take sides in such debates but simply to use the process of discussion to help widen the lens, to see more alternatives, possibilities, and implications.
Let me illustrate and be blunt. Author and Harvard professor Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Simon and Schuster, 2000) promotes civics as the building of “social capital.” His metaphor for our basic civic problem is that we are “bowling alone.” That, along with the larger “civil society” perspective that his model fits, is a very controversial approach to the theory and practice of civic empowerment. Even among those who evoke “social capital” and “civil society” frameworks, some draw conservative and others draw populist implications. Museums have important stakes in assessing where (or indeed whether) they want to fit in these controversies. Museums may be able to better historicize possibilities in the present and thus better recognize expectations and languages that others, particularly (as demonstrated in the Museums and Community Initiative’s Los Angeles dialogue) community-based organizations, will bring to partnerships, as well as the choices its members must make. Since museums may very well have a sense that they are striking out into unfamiliar and risky territory in this process, there is a great need to try to understand where the present moment fits in history and thus what directions and choices are likely to lie before us.
I want to suggest here why at this point debating these issues, as opposed to adopting a single specific position on them, should inform a museum’s civic initiative. Critics of Putnam’s “social capital” theory suggest that people are doing more things more actively together than in the past and that a good civics, rather than lamenting the loss of older collective forms (whose character may well be romanticized and whose racism and sexism are minimized in “social capital” theory), would begin with the vast range of new ways that citizens are acting together and collectively addressing social problems. They point to new participatory patterns in 12-step programs after the familiar model of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar programs, constructed around active collective participation. They also point to the rise of horizontal and interactive evangelical religious, women’s, and environmental organizations, and internships and experiential learning initiatives that make students more active shapers of their learning than a generation ago. They note that the complaint that technology and commerce have disconnected people from each other and from reality may reflect real changes, but such a complaint also echoes a tradition of cultural criticism that reaches back to Emerson and Thoreau and Ruskin in the 19th century. Contemporary critics like Garry Wills claim that our basic civic problems—income disparity, inadequate health care, poor schooling, proliferation of guns, relinquishing of real control to multinational corporations, a political system shaped by wealthy contributors—and the fact that other countries have solved these problems better than the United States suggest that the very distrust of government that Putnam and others promote may well retard a more progressive civics.1
This point is likely to be very important to many of the community-based organizations museums will encounter. We may indeed have lost the mid-20th-century faith that government can solve all problems—end depressions, win wars, or overcome poverty and racism—but I think it would be an intellectual and political mistake to join critics such as Christopher T. Gates, president of the Denver-based National Civic League, in seeing government more as a problem than as a solution [see Forum, “Democracy and the Civic Museum,” p. 47]. Indeed, Harry Boyte, author, activist, and professor at the University of Minnesota, has suggested that by turning the spotlight away from the corporate holders of real power and trying to dismiss government as a means for popular control, Putnam and his followers have relegated citizens to “the playground of civil society” where they can’t do any harm to powerful institutions, thus freeing such institutions from popular constraints. The civic issue is power, not trust. “Feeling helpless, we desire agency, power; we are offered, instead, [by social capital theorists] collaboration if we will do/volunteer more,” writes Elizabeth Minnich in what she calls a new version of “blame the victim.”2
From these critics’ perspective the watchword of civic partnerships becomes co-creation, not dialogue. Participants bring and share skills and resources that they contribute to making and sustaining powerful agents for solving everyday problems—for example, the re-entry of prisoners into their communities or daycare or crime or inadequate transportation or insensitive bureaucrats’ plans for school curricula or highways to intersect a neighborhood. Participants develop what Boyte calls “civic muscle” as they construct powerful alternatives.
And this exists not only in the realm of theory. There are real-world examples. In Tampa a science and industry museum commits permanent space to a Headstart program. In southern California a sheriff is looking to museums to help his huge staff imagine how museums can help them reintroduce parolees to community life. A southern California museum employs street gang members as docents despite curators’ fear that they will destroy collections. But here is raised an important question for our institutions: Are museums ready to commit people and resources to this vision of civic activism?3
Critics of the “social capital” perspective have proposed a different path for how institutions like libraries, colleges, and museums might approach their civic missions. They suggest that instead of beginning in outward-looking artificial dialogues and volunteering—everyone is already too busy to join vague civic dialogues—people in these institutions should begin by trying to identify the civic dimensions of their existing work. They then should use those as means to do two things: first to reach inward in hopes of turning their own workplaces into civically driven institutions, and then to look outward to other institutions and groups. The challenge to museums would be for their curators, marketers, docents, educators, boards, and managers to try to identify actual and potential civic dimensions in their work. The exercise of beginning by considering public and civic dimensions of existing work, Elizabeth Minnich and Harry Boyte4 argue, will “free the [civically-oriented] powers locked within” individuals in the work they do. When they do this, professionals will be likely to conclude that the overwhelming trend toward marketing and professionalizing that their institutions and professions have taken in recent years has submerged or frustrated civic motives or agendas that attracted them to their careers in the first place. The deeper, personal motivation that so many museum professionals cite as key to their job satisfaction may well have been devalued in their institutions’ increasing pursuit of earned income and other, more commercial concerns. Such internal exercises and discoveries, in turn, could provide fertile soil for developing serious discussion within a museum about what it means to build an institution on civic or public dimensions of work.
After listening to conversations in Tampa and Los Angeles, I was struck by the difficulties museums face when they begin to reach outward to new partnerships if they haven’t first looked inward, examined public or civic elements in all aspects within the museum, and defined how and why they are seeking partners to help them develop public and civic aspects of what they already do or want to be doing—in short, without making civic engagement the mission of the whole institution. And I would suggest that this issue be placed on the agenda of all museums that wish to pursue a course of deeper community engagement. Participants in the first three Museums and Community dialogues referred to this challenge. Representatives from several institutions said that outreach or community partnerships were simply pieces of their museums’ work, assigned to education or community programs departments but low priorities for the institution as a whole. Other participants claimed that their museums were not deeply committed to partnerships, that community programs were “window dressing.” One senior professional explained that “many museums have trouble seriously coming to grips with community and having community involvement as part of their mission,” noting that unless top administrators, not education directors, took part in such dialogues, community engagement would continue to be a low priority. Of course, the opposite could also be true: A museum might be led by an advocate of civic engagement but be staffed by people whose experiences and values were shaped by other considerations.
The University of Minnesota has provided a model for universities by launching an exercise in which all employees—administrators, faculty, technicians, librarians, secretaries—identify civic dimensions in their work. The university then provided funds to encourage employees to develop further civic implications in their work. In his recent charge to University of Minnesota staff the provost may have provided a model for museums when he asked whether civic engagement should be “another category” of activity or whether it should suffuse everything. “What makes a university a civic institution?” he asked. He answered: “The university does not do civic engagement; it is civically engaged. It begins by asking how civic engagement makes a difference in every other activity, how professional work is or should be different in a civically-engaged institution from one that is not civically engaged.”5
Partnerships with community groups become crucial means for museums to discover civic potential within the museum. I heard two reasons for this in the dialogues. First, community-based organizations simply have more practice in participatory civics. And second, as a human relations official observed in Los Angeles, pressure from community groups forces museums to pay attention to the sources of that pressure. He observed that community groups were listened to more respectfully during the protests of the 1960s than they are now because pressure has subsided and institutions such as museums can get by with the appearances but not the substance of sharing authority in such areas asdefining what should constitute a collection or ownership of a collection. In Los Angeles, community-based (often ethnic) and problem-oriented (often around problems of youth and law enforcement) groups provided a spectacular display of how to make partnerships work. I was stunned by how quickly and naturally they moved beyond the language funders use to define collaboration—“buy-ins,” “stakeholders,” “networking”—to critique how inadequate these words are in describing a reality where partners can genuinely co-create or confidently and fully share authority and resources. At one table a community organizer asked: “Are we trying to impress funders or to be serious?” about a partnership that group was contemplating. To him it was an important distinction. The director of a history museum expressed the fear that “social capital” would become the latest jargon he’d have to learn in order to satisfy funders rather than be a viable perspective that could help him improve his museum’s civic practice. At Providence, Tampa, and Los Angeles museum participants expressed the desire to listen to community-based organizations reflect on what they sought and learned from their partnership experiences.
On several occasions the experience and observation of participants at Los Angeles, sometimes expressed in asides, raised basic questions: how to present controversial subjects, how to collaborate with community groups, and even how to imagine future museums.
What is needed to deepen community and museum collaboration is a format that can encourage both community and museum people to reflect about the strengths and weaknesses, the surprising discoveries that accompany their attempts to move beyond networking and “buy-ins” to build sustained collaborations, to co-create, to empower each other, even to envision how such collaborations provide glimpses of a greater civic purpose within a museum. Museum directors or other officials would need to report candidly the challenges and problems they had encountered and perhaps failed to solve.
Many people have already discovered that sharing authority and resources is terribly scary, unfamiliar, and hard. And what’s worse, it’s likely to bring museums up against what the profession itself has called “best practices,” up against the whole professionalizing thrust that by definition aims to distance professionals from amateurs, to give professionals the skills and confidence to assert expertise and control, to view visitors as customers or students or amateurs, not as citizens or equals or partners.
In Los Angeles, an organizer for the St. Vincent de Paul Society told Robert Archibald, president of the Missouri Historical Society, that he didn’t know what museums could offer his group and thus what kind of partnership to imagine. I think Archibald’s answer to the St. Vincent organizer is significant. Archibald asked him whether he would be able to identify resources and skills his organization could use if he were provided with a description of the resources and skills the museum had to offer. The organizer enthusiastically said he could. Perhaps ways can be devised to provide community groups with some inventory of skills and resources that our museums have to offer—perhaps examples of partnerships already in motion. Community groups could then be invited to talk about how they might use certain resources and skills toward co-creating new partnerships. This exercise might encourage museums to see more clearly what they have to bring to civic partnerships, perhaps unexplored civic dimensions they had not fully appreciated. Can ways be found for community groups to express what they look for and need—as well as what they fear—from museums when they consider a partnership?
Because the word “trust” occurs frequently in discussions about museums and community, I want to comment on a study commissioned in July 2000 by the exhibition design group Ueland Junker McCauley and Nicholson. A copy of the study was distributed to participants at Tampa. I fear that, if interpreted literally, this study may actually make it harder for museums to build partnerships with community groups. In our book, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, (Columbia University Press, 1998), Roy Rosenzweig and I found the same basic conclusion as this study: Americans trust museums more than other institutions in our culture. But the Ueland study said the basis for this trust was that museums are seen as more “objective” than other sources. From our 1,500 half-hour interviews we do not believe that Americans are mainly looking for “objectivity” when they seek information about the past or that “objectivity” is what they trust in museums. We found that people trust museums because they connect people to original objects, invite visitors to form and test their own conclusions based on their own experiences, which are often formed with family and friends under terms shaped by the visitors (unlike history classes, say). We found Americans to be tremendously suspicious of mediation, including by “experts,” seeking instead direct firsthand engagement on their own terms. That’s what museums and historic sites offer. If museums conclude from the Ueland study that they are trusted because they are “objective,” which the dictionary defines as “impersonal,” they will have a hard time carrying on dialogues, let alone exploring civic dimensions within themselves and co-creating partnerships outside their walls with the kind of community- and problem-based groups I observed in Los Angeles.
It will not be easy for museums to identify the best process to follow in crafting an approach to community involvement. Will candid accounts of successes and failures—perhaps separately by both museums and their community partners—provide tools for other museums to learn from, to use and adapt for their own uses? Rather than being “best practices,” could these stories be “learning opportunities” in which the emphasis would be on learning and unlearning in motion, in practice?
There is a concern: what will participants of future dialogues carry away with them and how will they build on the conversations? The interests of local museums and community groups may be so diffuse that first-hand, individual accounts of actual partnerships might be more valuable than trying to find common denominators in such a complex initiative where individuals and their institutions and communities bring such varied agendas.
In its Museums and Community initiative, AAM has taken a creative and open-ended step that most of the institutions I know best—colleges and universities—have barely contemplated. The idea of listening to people from museums and community-based organizations in different communities talk about their experiences and try to imagine new collaborations strikes me as a great place to begin. Both at Tampa and Los Angeles participants brought hopes and fears into the open and showed themselves willing, sometimes eager, listeners to each other, participants in exploring common ground. The best thing about the project is that it taps into debates and experiences of diverse people in different places.
The significance of this initiative is so immense, the challenges in this area so diverse, that the watchwords for such dialogues must be experimentation and adaptability. Museums will need to listen to whether, as well as how, members of community-based organizations wish to engage museums on issues of partnership and the building of a civic society. Of equal importance, museum professionals must reflect among themselves about the internal challenges they face in recognizing, connecting to, and mobilizing civic dimensions in their activities as they contemplate or explore making civic engagement and partnership core missions of their institutions.
REFERENCES
1. From Campus Compact Reader, vol. 1, no.2 (Fall 2000) pp. 13-15.
2. Elizabeth Minnich, “What’s Wrong with Civic Life: Remembering Wellsprings of U.S. Democratic Action,” The Good Society, vol. 9, no. 2 (1999), pp. 7-14.
3. These debates are being carried on and alternatives generated in other institutions. Since participants at LA identified public libraries as models for museums to explore, AAM might explore Libraries for the Future (http://lff.org), a group that is spearheading the movement among libraries to become civic centers and interactive sites. The Project for Public Spaces (http://pps.org) grows out of participatory management movements. Publicwork.org, the Web site of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship carries on this debate.
4. See “Off the Playground of Civil Society,” pp. 1-7 and “Reconstructing Democracy,” pp. 32-36, The Good Society, vol. 9, no. 2 (1999).
Historian David Thelen is the author, with Roy Rosenzweig, of The Presence of the Past:Popular Uses of History in American Life.
