In academia veritas?

'I'm sick of all these specimens', said one boy to the other, 'well, it is Harvard!' his friend replied. This was a conversation that I overheard today while wandering in awe around the stunning exhibits at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Just around the corner, I saw a researcher march purposely up to a case, take out a stuffed bird on its stand and carry it off through the galleries. This got me thinking about the point of university museums, or rather what I think that point is, and, crucially, whom they are for.

You'd think that, having got my first two employment breaks in university museums, and therefore my early training there, I'd be a hard and fast fan of these institutions. I was, but have recently been questioning more and more how such museums identify and demarcate themselves, both from museums and from universities. University museums provide important collections for academics to study objects, and then to disseminate this research to a wider public. I would see this as a much more important goal than an academic monograph (you'll probably be unsurprised to hear). But so often that research can be minute and hard to communicate engagingly. If university museums merely become a form of navel gazing, in which academics reflect on their own practice, disciplinary concerns and intellectual conceits, without making these understandable to a visitor, then what is the point?

But, I am pleased to report that, despite my two young fellow visitors, the university museum is alive and thriving at Harvard. I feel they have got the balance just right in showcasing research and making it engaging. At the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, I was intrigued by two displays in the Pacific Islands gallery, one in which Translating Encounters were considered by Stephen Greenblatt's undergraduate classes; and another which announced students would be considering the model dioramas of Native American Life. The Natural History Museum, similarly frames it's Climate Change: Our Global Experiment display around current and historic Harvard research; and I heard at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments about new cases planned for undergraduates to learn to curate displays.

I also hear that plans are afoot to unite the Harvard Museums more clearly as a group of institutions, to build collaborate projects and displays. If this is what they are achieving individually, then I am excited for the future