Reinventing Museum Careers
Museum workers tend to have a high sense of ethics, strong workplace values, and genuine pride in their organizations, relative to many other professions. But in recent times, the field has experienced a variety of challenges with employee …
Listen to the Interns: The Importance of the “Budding Scholar” for Museum Decolonization
As a junior in college, I think I might have found my calling—for now anyway. For the past two and a half years I have been studying Art History, Museum Studies, and African American History at Duke University. I’ve committed myself to the …
Museum Studies Programs & Tools for Creating More Inclusive Curricula
The graduates of museum studies programs are overwhelmingly white and female. If we want museums to be staffed by people who reflect the American public, we can broaden our search beyond museum studies program, and we can encourage …
One Graduate’s Job Search Story…Consider Casting a Wider Net
I’m frequently asked to give advice about job searches, which puts me in an uncomfortable position: I want to be helpful, but I’m hesitant to offer advice based on my own initial forays into the field, which took place in a …
Monday Musing: A Radical Proposal on Student Debt
Student debt is a huge issue in our field, especially for emerging museum professionals. So this article caught my attention last week: No more student loans? Purdue University proposes selling shares of students’ future income. Purdue is …
A Bodacious Commitment to Diversity
Yesterday the Mellon Foundation released a report based on the first comprehensive survey of the demographics of art museum staff. For the most part, it documents what we already knew: “professional” staff in museums (e.g., directors, …
The Museum Sacrifice Measure
How much are you willing to give up to work in a museum? How much didyou give up to work in a museum? I’m not talking about quality of life issues like relocating to a new city, having to explain over and over again, at parties, what a …
How to Staff the Future
I’ve been spouting off for years about how museums need to change the way they recruit, select and train staff. Why? Because Museums say they want a more diverse workforce, but the major pipeline for future professional staff—museum …
Where Should Museums Look for the Workforce of the Future?
Intel just hired Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas to be their Director of Creative Innovation. Google hired futurist and noted transhumanist (“the singularity is coming”) Ray Kurtzweil as its Director of Engineering. President Obama just …
Back to School: Museum Studies Programs During Tough Times
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2012 edition of the Museum magazine. When the economy took a nose dive in fall 2008, I heard more than one person reference Machiavelli’s 600-year-old maxim: “Never …
