The Human Side of Controversy
Controversies are by their nature emotional affairs. Like the Sorting Hat in Harry Potter, they very quickly split people into groups aligned by opinion. The more the group identifies with its opinion, the stronger its passion. Unfortunately, many people mistake passion for rightness. The louder the group, the more righteous its cause.
Every day we are witnessing this phenomenon play out in our political, civic, and even social arenas. Our nation is said to be polarized, divided between mutually exclusive mindsets, their adherents hewing with absolutist tenacity to unalterable positions. Whoever breaks from orthodoxy runs the risk of being judged, shamed, assailed, and bullied.
I’m sorry to say that this pattern may also be playing out in our museum profession. The Berkshire Museum controversy has swept through the field like a California wildfire, igniting argument, inflaming angry blog posts, sparking partisanship over whether the museum should be shunned for its ethical violations, whether it really needs all that money, and whether its so-called “New Vision” will in fact work to keep the museum alive for another few years.
This is disheartening. Our field has too many challenges that require unity, not division. We need to band together in advocacy to affirm the value of museums to society and encourage adequate resources to support that value. We need to band together in harmony to find ways to encourage diversity and inclusion on our staff and our boards. We need to band together in compassion to support our fellow museum people and their institutions facing hard times.
Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion. Respectful airing of opinion and dissent actually promotes unity. But I am observing a slightly different development in the case of the Berkshire Museum. More strident rhetoric. More ad hominem castigation. More righteous anger directed at those who disagree. This behavior undercuts understanding and puts even neutral folks in the position of having to choose sides.
We need to be mindful that there is a human toll to this. I have not spoken with the Berkshire Museum since the news broke this summer, but I would suspect that on a personal level the people who work there, staff and board alike, are not exactly walking on air right now. I have spoken, though, with people who have told me how anguishing it is to argue with colleagues who seem to be swept away with anger over the affair. Both colleagues have lost respect for one another, a sad chapter in a professional relationship.
At the recent NEMA conference we held a Think Tank session called “The Deaccessioning Dilemma: How Can We Support Standards AND Museums in Crisis?” I am very proud of this for a few reasons. First, I am grateful for being part of an organization that recognizes the importance of positive dialogue and trying to create solutions to our field’s complex problems. It’s very easy to simply censure someone for being unethical. The hard part is to identify and address underlying causes for the unethical behavior.
The Think Tank session involved about 140 participants early on Friday morning. (Just as the sun finally shone on the conference! Thank you session moderator Laura Roberts for keeping our heads in the game!) The group spent 90 hard minutes framing the issues and brainstorming solutions, and this is the second reason I’m proud of the Think Tank: one of the solutions recognized the human side of the controversy. Participants suggested that the museum field is deathly afraid of failure and all of its terrifying attributes: fear of the loss of stature and respect, fear of the “witch hunt” and bullying, fear of appearing to be a loser. In the long run, it was observed, this fear might contribute to unethical deaccessioning because our colleagues would rather tough it out alone than accept support from their peers.
Participants said we need to change the culture within our field, to show more compassion to colleagues in financial distress, to support them more. Participants said we need to develop a new language. We need “safe words” to replace pejoratives like “crisis” and “failure.” And we need to create “safe spaces” in which to have difficult, honest conversations in a judgment-free zone. Safe spaces like NEMA, one participant observed to the agreement of many in the room. Needless to say, this also made me proud of our NEMA community.
The Think Tank didn’t solve anything that day. That will take wider discussion in a broader forum. But it did make me realize something very significant. Solutions to the “deaccessioning dilemma” are not going to be successful if the conversation is simply about tightening the rules, censuring, and enforcing. We will not be successful unless we take into account the human side of controversy. When we do this, we help unify the field behind solutions. And in that way we are all successful.
Dan Yaeger