Improving Museum Studies
Posted in Individualism, Museum Expansionism, Politics, Presentism on 11. Aug, 2009
I’ve seen a lot of blog posts recently about the Future of Museum Studies courses. I am infuriated by how the discussion seems to be along a ciriculum basis and that those providing the courses need to make these minute changes in education practices and pray for a long term gain.
You want to have an excellent Museum Studies program? Guarantee jobs.
When someone passes your course, they should be immediately headhunted into a museum. I don’t mean year long internships, I mean proper actual employment with a goddamn living wage.
Call it the same performance indicators as your pass rate. “100% of our students passed”. Every school, college and university aspires to 100% pass rates. If they’re not, then they have a target to aim for. Here’s a new goal: “100% of our student got a job in the museum sector”.
Okay, you can wuss out and say “100% of our students, who passed and *wanted* a job in museum sector, got one”.
This should be actively and aggressively pursued. Not this tinkering with the conceptual. Have some faith that the person you hand a piece of paper with their name and award on it is an intelligent person ready for what museuming can throw at them.
Of course, it’s criminal to take their money, hand them a piece of paper and wish them luck with a handshake. Too many graduates from the full full taxonomy of museum studies courses are having to compete in the job market lottery. And it is a lottery. The most basic entry-level positions into the museum world are now getting TONS of applicants. This is a sad state of affairs.
Maybe this is another performance indicator. Maybe schools shouldn’t be taking the money of these students if the future employment doesn’t exist. Isn’t that the greater problem? Museum’s hardly have a high turnover of staff with people sitting in the same position for umpteen years. We are Wasting the Opportunities of the Talented.
Without going into too much detail about the “how” (someone will undoubtedly bring up costs), I think there are two ways. Turn Museum Studies courses into headhunter networks. Take your students work and CV and cram it up the noses of your contacts. Try not to insult your student body with volunteer work. I’ve seen the answer countless times: “To get into museums, do lots of volunteering and internships”.
In short, something just above slavery. Work hard for an indeterminate amount of time and maybe the industry will maybe reward you. The current model for improving museums through new blood is the same as parents controlling children with Santa.
The other option would be an establishing of a museum milkround. I am told this is a particularly British concept, and I have no idea if this sort of thing happens in the US. A milkround used to be when companies would actively recruit in universities. They would trip over themselves to get graduates. Alas, this was in a time where there were a slight fewer graduates who didn’t have to take on several thousand pounds worth of debt. The system must still be able to work, right? How many museum studies-esque courses are there? How many museums are there? Surely this relationship can be facilitated.
But no. All this got delegated to online job boards and magazine advertising. It created a lottery.
The bitter taste in the museum student’s mouth was that what they thought was professional development is now considered almost useless to their future compared to the gamble of the job market or the gamble of obtaining a useful contact.
The courses should be doing this for them. Not enough of them are.
I’ve read a few things about the skepticism around academia as work training. My Christ, who let in all these Art History and Archaeology PHDs? They’re practically *running* the place and now there’s the hint that a Museum Studies qualification is unnecessary? The one thing these people are being trained in are now possibly not trained? Or not trained enough, as I notice in another comment that museums are made of of too many specialisms. Nonsense. The whole world’s industry is made up of specialisms. This is the sort of thing you’ll learn on the job. You want a task done, get someone with the intelligence to do so. Not mess around trying to find someone with one hundreds years of proven experience
That way leads to stagnation. That way leads to the brightest graduate stars never been given a chance. Train them, teach them, give them your Mark of Cain and get them the chance to perform. They need you.
RANT: I won’t go into detail about the extensively long list of work I have done for my Museum Studies students over almost 20 years to help them get work and make connections. And, indeed, not so long ago we did have 100 per cent placement. Even in this recession, our graduates are getting interviews and landing jobs. But there are LOTS of reasons students don’t get work, some of which have nothing to do with the curriculum or program but more about the students demands about what and where of the job and an interest shift along the way. Reasons go on and on and do include this economy. The first thing out of our mouths at our program open house is that the work is tough and low paying. We are honest and direct to the point that we scare applicants away.
You might want to read this article http://tiny.cc/DE9vt about the discrepancy of pay between the top and the bottom. Museum Studies programs in and of themselves do not cause the low-paid salaries, and in fact, I do intense amount of lobbying to get museums to RAISE their salaries so that they can get and keep my educated students. On several occasions my effort has worked. We have a long track record of students staying in the field from our program. They tell us that the work they did during their degree helped them to be much less frustrated on how do their jobs because they know more about how museums function. The degree has helped others understand how to work in jobs outside the field as it teaches them how to write, present, think and be effective in a professional setting. The education background transfers to other areas.
Low salaries for workers exist across the non-profit world. Let’s find some constructive ways to fix this.
I may have to do another article about wages…
Thanks for the comment.
Pete — thanks for your post — appreciated reading it. I worked hard to earn a museum studies degree several years ago – but found it next to impossible to get a decent job in museums. The next step seemed to be earning a PHd. But, there was no money for that.
I have been happily employed in public relations ever since.
I strongly disagree with your thesis for three reasons.
First, not all people who go to graduate school are doing it to improve their position in the job market. Some of them want an academic experience, and while I am not an academic person, I can understand their desire to dig into theory in an exhaustive and not necessarily job-focused way.
Second, I disagree that graduate degrees in museum studies are needed to be good exhibit developers, educators, membership managers, etc. Museum studies degree programs are an option, but unless these jobs become as specialized as those of conservators, they need not be the only option.
And most importantly, I don’t believe your recommendation would improve museums. I would prefer to visit a museum staffed by people who volunteered there for two years than one packed with graduates who were guaranteed a job there post-graduation. I don’t want to visit places where the employees feel entitled to their jobs. I want to visit places where employees are passionate. And I don’t care what path they took to get there.
1. Well, that why I said “Anyone who wanted a job…” because I realise this. Why you would shoulder that much debt for fun and not the hopes of advancing your employment status is beyond me.
2. Well, no they are not “needed” as the museum world continues to prove otherwise by increasing narrow-minded hiring practices. The point was to make museum studies courses the most important source. I firmly believe, and I can’t point to when it stopped being so, but someone with a university degree has proven themselves worthy as part of the upper intelligensia and able to do whatever you to do to a degree-level, regardless of what it is. They can learn.
3. This is something else that I may write another article on: the extreme overuse of volunteers in museums. It’s not healthy and its not sustainable. Any other model relying this heavily on unpaid labour is normally illegal or doomed to failure. Can you imagine a magazine not paying its writers? Or a television program not paying it’s production team? What kind of quality are we to expect?
Myself, I would prefer a museum that paid its staff. And yeah, I would expect big things from a museum of graduates because when that happens in the IT sector, it’s called an up-and-coming start-up.
Entitled??? So, what is better? Getting the job immediately after your graduation, giving you a sense of pride and confirmation of your own self-worth, or having to grind away at the pseudo-bottom-rung of museums, getting more and more bitter at the crap you have to do in order to maybe one day start reducing the enormous amount of debt?
That’s not building towards a future, that’s selling it out.
Hi Pete,
First, thank you very much for this post. You are starting an important conversation. It is good to have someone speaking up on the part of all of us Museos who graduated with great degrees and have never even gotten interviews despite experience and “those letters after our names.” I would like to suggest two options that might offer a way forward.
1. Should Museum Studies professionalize? Could there be national/international tests and then a certification process? Surely, if employees are being placed in charge of national treasures, they should be able to PROVE abilities in each of the areas, be it collections, exhibition, education, etc. Therefore, museums would know they were receiving the best candidates. An alternative to a standardized test could be a standard portfolio or application. A resume/cover letter does not begin to express the skills and talents developed by Museum Studies grads.
PS – I know this option sounds like applying to college or grad school, but then again, museums are themselves learning institutions. Just as our universities picked the best of the best, shouldn’t museums be doing the same?
2. Should Museum Studies Grads unionize? This could take two forms… the first would be similar to the Freelancer’s Union, an open source union for freelance workers in the US, where the group lobbies for low priced healthcare. However, if other issues aren’t addressed this would only perpetuate low pay and unpaid internships. The other option would be to have the group actually lobby for certain (FAIR) wages. This would be the most helpful. Large national organizations like the AAM and IMLS (or whoever would be willing to help) could stand behind groups like this and offer museums incentives (better or different ratings, better or unique grants, etc) to get them to hire these Highly Skilled graduates. And yes, a Master’s degree would be a prereq to getting into the union. Until we as graduates start refusing point blank to offer our very expensively and extensively educated selves to work for free, we are going to be expected to do so. But we have to agree to that as a whole.
Looking at these options, I don’t know how a sea change such as this could ever come about. Like you said, the people in the jobs aren’t going anywhere. And “in their day” you had to work your way up etc etc.
I’d love to hear your take on these ideas. (A more lighthearted take on these propositions is presented by a friend and fellow museum freethinker at http://nerdgasms.tumblr.com/post/160685889/a-museum-workers-union )
1. Something I’m entertaining in my mind is for Museum Studies programs to act as the interview and recruitment departments for museums. Kinda like how some youth sports teams act as feeders to the pros. American football does that, right? There’s college football then a draft process? Something to think about.
2. I don’t know. I like the idea of a group to institute change but I’m not keen on power politics. As I notice with most museum membership organisations, they tend to benefit the few or are under constant threat of becoming irrelevent. I suppose it would be how such a union would be set up. Again, I don’t know if it would provide more positives.
At the risk of sounding like a bitter old mare, I have to say this debate is hardly new. The job market was saturated way back in 2001 when I finished my MA. Salaries were appalling, contracts were rarely permanent nor full-time. The recent-ish Museums Association guidelines have improved the salary issue thankfully. Museums workers – at least in the UK – are unionised, or at least they have established unions to which they can join.
While I would not begin to pretend that there is no longer a problem in Britain, this current debate sounds like a North American issue at present. Private institutions, which I believe are more the norm in America, are always going to be strapped for cash unfortunately.
As for museum studies programmes: I do feel that prospective students need to be made aware AT THE OUTSET that the degree will not guarantee a career in museums. That said, as with any course of education, you ultimately do it for the love of it. A job in the field at the end of it is a bonus.
After teaching at a design school for some seven years, I think the problem you highlight exists all across the “culture” making sector of the economy. As I see it, the problem is moving away from mentored apprenticeship and towards “professionalism.”
Certifications are the signifier in academia. In that context they can play a useful role in certifying that a person has become familiar and adept at using the traditions of that specialized discipline. To be clear, I am not familiar with the world of museum studies.
But in the world I do know, an MA for a graphic designer? What exactly is that meant to certify? Mostly its become a requirement for teaching in a design school. It has no credibility in the profession. Yet the MA programs are wonderful cash generators, at least in the States. Staffed primarily by adjuncts who are working to find new hires and build their own credibility with students paying top dollars and piling up serious debts because they have assumed it was important.
I’m specifically not saying this is anyone’s fault. It’s a culture making model that has grown up because it could. I think it’s fair to say that human systems will grow in whatever direction they can. Pass a law putting a cap on the cost of design education and entreprenuers will figure out a way to sell the certificate with online courses and whatever else to maintain their margins.
Sorry for the long comment, but I’ve watched young people and their families in the States go into $50 to $100,000 debt because they wanted the best for themselves and their children.
In my not so humble opinion, there are many design schools that should be sued for educational malpractice.
I’m intrigued by the idea of suing a university for not getting a job (and amused as it seems like a very American idea) but it is happening http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/08/03/new.york.jobless.graduate/index.html
If Universities are moving away from institutions which are for purely theoretical exploration (if they ever were that) and are becoming increasingly part of the ‘training for jobs’ then it seems if the student has to pay they should get a job – and yes that should be an entitlement of the course. Otherwise it should be beholden on the industry to pay for the students ‘training’.
I totally agree with the idea of Volunteers being extremely overly used in museums, and a problem. I tend to have the same opinions of those who don’t wish to pay for their staff as you suggest, I also think low pay is almost as terrible. If museums want the best we should be ready to pay for it. I look forward to seeing a post on that! In the conservation world there are volunteers, and there are also “interns” who for the most part are also volunteers and may end up working for many years unpaid in order to get into grad school all with the possibility of not getting a job at the end. So conservation also functions with a very large base of unpaid labor.
Thanks for the great post, and the interesting comments that have followed. I think I may have to write a post about some of this on my blog too.
Cheers, Dan
What Amy said, mostly.
And FWIW, TV, film and fashion also rely on volunteers or unpaid interns – working for a year unpaid to get your foot in the door is more common than not, from what friends say. (That doesn’t make it right, it just makes it common.)
This is a great, thought provoking post that provides so many questions to explore.
After attempting to respond here earlier this afternoon and realizing I had far too much to say, I wrote up my own blog post on this topic and the ideas you bring forward. Here’s the post: http://colleendilen.com/2009/08/12/where-are-museum-studies-graduate-programs-going-wrong/
Thanks for getting the juices flowing for me and for so many other folks. The discussion is very interesting and exciting!
Great post, and great conversation in the comments! :) I don’t agree with everything that you’ve written but am just so happy to see people talking about what’s to be done about museum studies programmes. The thing I’m going to comment about is volunteers and museums, I have a lot of passionate feelings about it.
I agree that volunteers are depended on for too much in the museum field and volunteer roles can get rather un-defined, sometimes resulting in volunteers doing the work that professionals should be doing. In the back of my head, it is my fear that when budgets get slashed, people start thinking, “What jobs can we cut and fill with volunteers?”
I recently had to leave a museum job due to work visa issues (I was working abroad), but stayed on as a volunteer at the same organization. I refused to do any work that I had previously been paid to do. I think asking too much of volunteers de-values the work of professionals, and it can put too much pressure on volunteers, too. There’s nothing worse than being stressed out by your job that you do for free for fun once a week- volunteers deserve to have professionals supporting them in all types of institutions.
I agree wholeheartedly in the seemingly prevailing opinion about the limited utility of volunteer labor. At my institution we use volunteers for many things, mostly as docents and gardeners, and a few scattered about doing various tasks (most of the volunteers doing real work are former employees that retired or what have you).
Passion, by the way, doesn’t make a crappy art handler or framer magically good, nor does it make up for any other skill deficiencies. I’d take skilled bored people over passionate unskilled people any day of the week.
We also run a graduate museums studies program here, and while many of our grads are successful, some are not (in terms of finding immediate employment after graduation).
Guaranteed placement sounds a little too close to a vocational institution for me. If you want to get ahead and get a job, be the best you can possibly be, and network your rear end off.. just like in other competitive job markets (like, for example, presidents of the united states, astronauts, race car drivers, etc etc.)
No coddling!
Is that because you could instill passion in a bored person but don’t want to upskill the unskilled?
You say vocational like its a curse word. I admit, vocational does sound a bit “practical hand-skills” over academic study (which museums do love to try to be more like), but there’s nothing wrong with being able to forge a path beyond that of a current commitment.
Also, there’s a big difference between a competitive job market and an insular industry.
Guaranteed jobs? Are you serious? If one wants to have guaranteed employment one should look into becoming a plumber (or suchlike profession that actually is in constant demand).
Well, how do plumbers do it? They are, ultimately, another service industry.
People seem to be jumping all over the “guaranteed” part like somehow just saying it means the whole process becomes cheapened. This would require partnerships, innovative approaches, high impact networks of all professionals. At the moment, too many course take the money and say “Well done and Good Luck” at the end. Is that good enough? We want to talk about cheapening, let’s talk about reducing education to a series of economic transactions. The irony…
I suppose all I’m proposing is that universities start championing their own students and act as their agents. Because nobody else is helping them. Not unreasonable, is it? To give a damn about the life of your students above that of commodities.
I wonder how many people who are involved in these discussions actually work or have worked in a museum. I work in a mid-sized art museum and find that generally, the people doing the hiring know what kind of person they are looking for. Museum jobs are actually quite diverse and a museum studies degree only qualifies those graduates for a small portion of the workforce. (If museum studies students are plumbers, and a museum is a construction site, they are only doing some of the work, along with carpenters, architects, etc.) And these jobs, in turn, only open up occassionally. I actually discovered that many museum professionals came to the field with a studio art degree. While I agree that smart people (proven by an MA) are good learners, some artistic skills aren’t so easily learned. I agree that a museum studies background can inform a museum career, but while such a degree may make one qualified, it doesn’t make one competitive. Experience, skills, and creativity make one competitive.
Placing the blame for unemployed museum studies grads on those doing the hiring and saying that they should preference museum studies graduates (such as the suggestion of graduates unionizing) is an insult to the museum professionals that are using their experience to do the hiring. Museum studies students are not the only ones with “passion” to work in the field, and should receive no guarantees. I think you will also find that museums are generally supportive of all students who take an intersest in museum work and offer internships and opportunities as much as they can (it actually takes a lot of time out of the supervisor to have an intern, so it’s not always something they can do).
My suggestion: museum studies programs should either broaden to make the education transferable to other fields, or link with more specialized programs such as architecture, business, etc. (offering double MAs would be great!).
Thanks from the comment Al, but I want you to know how close I came to not approving it.
First of all, please don’t belittle those in this discussion with ad hominem arguements, especially straight away in the first sentence.
Whoever doing the hiring doesn’t know what kind of person they want to hire: they make risk judgements. That’s not a condition of personality.
Bizarrely, I don’t see how a studio art degree is any better than any other, apart from proving your own narrow-minded view of constitutes a person’s creative output.
No one can be competative if there ain’t no competition. This is what we’ve been talking about.
And, finally, your suggestion blows. You think that broadening a course would make it better? Think how many humanity subject out there that are already problematic because they don’t exactly “train” a person for a career. So you want to “broaden” it by making it less relevant to museums. Or you want to offer it as a double MA, completely cheapening it as an “unworthy” subject in its own merit. There are two few subject that can get away with being doubled up without looking like flakey.
And you work in an art museum?
You say “You want to have an excellent Museum Studies program? Guarantee jobs.”
Another possibility would be to make the Museum Studies programs joint venture partners of the students
http://perkurowski.blogspot.com/2007/01/should-not-higher-education-be-more-of.html
Personally, I know for a fact that I got hired by my boss because of a combination of my museum studies degree (she has one too) and my interesting cover letter and great interview (these last two being a combination of skills I have acquired on my own to make me easy to hire me and how my personality meshed with my boss, which no program would teach no matter what). I think a lot of the issue of getting a job and not having our degree respected is on account of the “old guard” museum folk who value their own kind of experience which was likely coming into the field with little explicit knowledge of museums and learning as they went. These “boomers” will be retiring soon and jobs will begin to open, and begin to be filled with MS students as more of them get to be involved in writing job descriptions and doing the hiring. It is important to remember that museums studies is fairly new field and is just now getting the respect it deserves.
One thing that my program stresses is making us better candidates for jobs by requiring specific classes that teach skills that are showing up on job descriptions that the professors read on our behalves. No matter if you emphasis is on collections management, conservation, education, exhibit design or management/administration, everyone must take fundraising, exhibit design, one collections-centered course and one management-centered course. Fundraising responsibilities are increasingly important whether you are a curator, aquarium biologist or executive director (in the US anyway) so being able to talk intelligently about fundraising even in my interview for volunteer management makes me a better candidate for a museum job because I understand how the system works as a whole. This is what I think MS programs need to do to help their students find jobs, in addition to helping them network. I also feel that my most valuable networking is probably going to be with my fellow students, not necessarily the people in high positions now. Personally, I moved across the country to pursue my degree and plan on moving back when I am done, so my profs can only do so much for me with their local connections anyway, but giving a broad museum education will never hurt. Another step that I took on my own behalf was to make sure that the my own work and the required internships and practica were in several different kinds of organizations. I have volunteered/worked in 2 very large science museums, 1 small art gallery at home, 1 large large art gallery abroad, 1 small specialty art museum, and 1 historical society. I am 25 and happily employed at a wonderful institution with room for advancement. I hope this gives some hope to your readers!
Pete, I also think you were being overly harsh on Al. He was wondering how many posters worked in museums because his own experience told him that people he knew were in their position because of a combination of skills that fit the needs for the job no matter what their degree is in. I also think it is ludicrous to say that personality and special skills don’t factor into hiring in light of my own job experience. There are factors way beyond those, too. I know that even though she couldn’t say it on paper, when a friend of mine was hiring an assistant she really wanted someone at least 6 inches taller than her because of how they stored materials and another friend who wanted to hire a man no matter what because they had an all-female workforce and needed to diversify. Also, Al never said a studio art degree = the only way to be creative, he just said that a combination of creativity and skills is more important than a specific degree, and those people’s artistic skills helped them be good at their jobs. This is mean, but I look around at some of my fellow museum studies students and frankly, they don’t measure up. They might do all the coursework and pass, but that doesn’t mean I trust their judgment or intelligence to do the job better than someone who took a different path.