By Franklin Robinson

 This article was published in Museum News, September/October issue 2007.

How do we train them? Are there really any courses that can teach what they need to know? What is it they should learn? What is it they should be?

Forty overlapping years—30 as a museum director, 4 as director of a graduate program and 13 as a college teacher—have left me both hopeful and skeptical of the effectiveness of training for museum directors. To a great degree, every director learns on the job, and his or her success depends on the fit of that particular person in that particular situation.

Nevertheless, graduate and undergraduate training are important, particularly because of the values that guide them. B. F. Skinner said, “Education is what remains after what you have learned has been forgotten.” In our case, what remains is complex, even sometimes contradictory. Clearly, the museum director must care about people and want to see them flourish in their jobs. The director must also protect the museum’s reputation, its fiscal integrity, its commitment to scholarship, education and the public. Above all, he or she is responsible for nurturing the collection.

What is the best way to convey all this to students? At the least, the training program—undergraduate or graduate—should have easy access to a good museum (a first-rate library and faculty are givens). Not necessarily a big museum, but one that is very active, oriented toward education and the public. I also believe that every serious student should be exposed to the big city. The experience of a New York or a Chicago, or a London or Berlin, is irreplaceable; its energy, its variety, the standards it demands, even its indifference to the individual are all things a young person should encounter early on, hopefully for more than just quick visits.

What is the best format—a museum studies program or an art history curriculum (or other such content-based curricula)? Frankly, I think both approaches have their limitations. Museum work itself, of course, is “content”; the literature alone is vast. However, in an art museum, for example, every decision is, or should be, taken in the context of art—the work of art and the public’s access to it. This is the core of why we exist and the service we provide. What to stock in the shop, how many administrators to hire, budget allocations, the new wing’s functions and design—each decision affects every other and helps create the museum experience as a whole.

These decisions, then, should be made with that impact in mind, balancing priorities and maintaining a deep awareness of the institution’s core purposes. In other words, the museum’s content—art, in the case of the art museum—should be the new director’s starting point, and museum studies programs should emphasize this. The student should go through a total immersion in the subject; any scholarly discipline is not a set of facts but a way of thinking.

On the other hand, graduate programs in art history and other “content” disciplines should change. They are not preparing students for the jobs that are available. The faculty must be aware that most of their students, like it or not, won’t end up as professors; they should prepare them for the jobs that are there.

This means separate courses on museum work that teach more than registration methods, courses whose students visit museums, listen to their staff, curate exhibitions and write catalogues. It also means changes in every other course—an awareness of the original artwork behind the slide on the screen. That much-maligned, old-fashioned word “connoisseurship” is, in the end, essential to a curator and a director; love of the object and the ability to assess its authorship, authenticity, condition and, above all, quality is the first and last thing I look for in hiring a curator. It is what trustees should look for in hiring a director.

One of the best ways to learn museum work is to put together a real exhibition: conceive the show, lay out the installation, wrestle with shipping, write the catalogue. The 30 or so exhibitions that students—graduate and undergraduate—have done for my museums have ranged from Japanese surimono prints to contemporary architectural drawings, each with a corresponding publication. This is a revelation for students and a way to achieve their full potential. It also provides something solid for resumes. Not incidentally, such a range of shows provides an unusually rich diet for visitors.

Equally important is the big-city experience. I have been fortunate enough to have always lived fairly close to New York. For four remarkable years, we even took all our graduate students to Europe for a month. The small university or college museum that students consider their own is a precious, irreplaceable resource. Nevertheless, there is no substitute for exposure to the very best, whether the Metropolitan or the Modern, the American Museum of Natural History or the Field Museum, the British Museum or the Louvre. The graduate program that doesn’t somehow get its students into those buildings is shortchanging them.

But great museums are not all a great city can offer. I regularly take students to commercial galleries, where dealers talk to them at length. We go to private collectors—some student shows borrow from them—and this adds another facet to their understanding of the museum world and another skill, sociability, that they have to offer that world.

Make no mistake: Young people are not always ready for professional demands. Not everyone is suited for museum work or foreign travel, or even domestic; they get lost, run out of money and so forth. But in spite of the occasional problems, they learn, and they love it.

Above all, organizing an exhibition and visiting great museums and big cities are the best ways to learn to look, to train the eye. Having to decide whether to include this impression of a Rembrandt etching or that one, this Egyptian ushabti or that, in your own show, with your own name on it, concentrates the mind; the student brings to bear the scholarly and technical evidence, the historical context and the feel of the work, among much else. As for travel, quantity is almost as important as quality; one of the best and most daunting exercises is having to go through a dealers’ fair at the Armory on Park Avenue and pick out the three most appropriate acquisitions for your college museum’s collection. Another is to visit 50 or 60 dealers in Chelsea in one afternoon and lay bets on the future of this or that emerging artist. Such experiences are precious and challenging, and increasingly rare as one grows older and more embedded in responsibilities.

At the very least, every potential director or curator should spend a good part of his or her graduate years as a museum intern, learning the dog work of the profession and living cheek by jowl with real works of art. This exhilaration, rooted in everyday realities, will help the future director understand and sympathize with staff and pass on that excitement to the next generation.

In this context, it is worth remembering how Toscanini became a conductor. He was a cellist with an orchestra on tour in South America. One evening, the conductor was sick, and someone said, Young Arturo knows the score, let him do it tonight, and that was it. No courses, no training, just dumb luck.

Franklin Robinson is the Richard J. Schwartz Director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.