Baby, Bathwater, &c.

Larry Small resigns as Smithsonian chief. In a reversion to form, a scientist will act as secretary: Cristian Samper, biologist and director of the National Museum of Natural History. (Small was a banker.) Scientists from across the system, who complained loudly during Small's tenure, are no doubt breathing a sigh of relief to have a research man back at the helm again. You can almost hear the celebratory clink of test tubes!

But is Small's resignation the best thing for the Smithsonian? Look at the numbers: "Small raised more money for the Smithsonian in his seven-year tenure than had been raised in the previous history of the institution." Of course, Small's extravagant personal indulgences were inappropriate, a gross abuse. Nevertheless they were a small price to pay for the kind of fundraising mechanism that Small brought to the Smithsonian. The board of regents will rally around his resignation—that's base camp before the long, hard, PR slog back to respectability—but there will be more than a few wistful, nostalgic sighs for the heyday (the somewhat corrupt heyday, albeit!) that Small's tenure represented.

Samper might be some sort of philosopher-king, able to match Small's business acumen while restoring public faith in the Smithsonian's dedication to pure research and cultural heritage. (In this regard—the real business of the Smithsonian—Small fell far short of the mark.) But I have my doubts. The latter work is crucial, of course, especially right now, but it's the former that concerns me. Small's resignation means that Larry Small will no longer be sipping champagne and sampling caviar on the taxpayer's dime. The resignation alone, however, doesn't signal that the Smithsonian is erecting safeguards and oversight mechanisms to prevent this kind of abuse from happening in the first place.

My worry is that, in the zealous spirit of reconstruction, officials will be tempted to make sure that the Smithsonian never hires another Larry Small. This is the wrong lesson to take away. I don't know Samper from Adam, but if his selection amounts to deprecating the significance of finance and fundraising in the job description of the secretary, then Samper is not a safe choice. In an era where public support for the nation's treasury is eroding—not just the $17 M in funding that the Senate voted to withhold, but the congressional support of a systemwide pay admissions architecture—you can't afford milquetoast financial leadership. You want to hire another Larry Small—and then you want to hire a board of accountants to watch him like hawks.

I say this in greater length in The Guardian: museums should act like corporations—ones with real oversight.

DISCLOSURE: I contribute to Eye Level, the blog by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.