2 If you were the Dean, how would you go about designing a process to decide the future direction of the University Art Museum?

Visitors to the campus were always shown the University Art Museum, of which the large and distinguished university was very proud. A photograph of the handsome neoclassical building that housed the museum had long been used by the university for the cover of its brochures and catalogues.

The building, together with a substantial endowment, was given to the university around 1912 by an alumnus, the son of the university’s first president, who had become very wealthy as an investment banker. He also gave the university his own small, but high-quality collections – one of Etruscan figurines, and one, unique in America, of English pre-Raphaelite paintings. He then served as the museum’s unpaid director until his death. During his tenure he brought a few additional collections to the museum, largely from other alumni of the university. Only rarely did the museum purchase anything. As a result, the museum housed several small collections of uneven quality. As long as the founder ran the museum, none of the collections were ever shown to anybody except a few members of the university’s art history faculty, who were admitted as the founder’s private guests.

After the founder’s death, in the late 1920s, the university intended to bring in a professional museum director. Indeed, this had been part of the agreement under which the founder had given the museum. A search committee was to be appointed; but in the meantime a graduate student in art history, who had shown interest in the museum and who had spent a good many hours in it, took over temporarily. At first, Miss Kirkoff did not even have a title, let alone a salary.

But she stayed on acting as the museum’s director and over the next 30 years was promoted in stages to that title. But from the first day, whatever her title, she was in charge. She immediately set about changing the museum altogether. She catalogued the collections.

She pursued new gifts, again primarily small collections from alumni and other friends of the university.