Lessons from a Deaccession

By Laura R. Katzman and Karol A. Lawson

In Oct. 1, 2007, president John Klein of Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va., surprised the director of the campus’s Maier Museum of Art by arriving unannounced at the museum shortly before 5 p.m. with a phalanx of support staff, city police officers, an attorney and contracted art handlers. They were there to take away four paintings: George Bellows’s Men of the Docks, Edward Hicks’s A Peaceable Kingdom, E. Martin Hennings’s Through the Arroyo and Rufino Tamayo’s Troubadour. At the direction of the college’s trustees, the paintings were to be auctioned to raise money for the general budget. The sale and removal of the works, which were put on a truck to Christie’s in New York that night, ran counter to the museum’s own administration-approved operational policies. Guided by AAM’s code of ethics, these state that deaccessioning must originate with the director and from curatorial imperatives and have as its purpose the improvement of the permanent collection.

The event, referred to as a “targeted heist” by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the “Monday Massacre” by journalist Lee Rosenbaum, had elements of the absurd. As witnessed by the museum director and her staff, police warned away outraged bystanders by invoking a bomb threat, the museum’s phone and computer lines were cut, and the four priceless artworks were ignominiously carted out of the facility cloaked in bubble wrap. Further complicating matters was Board President Lucy Hooper’s public announcement in an e-mail that evening that some auction proceeds would be used to endow the museum directorship, violating AAM standards yet again. Recognizing this, the Association of College and University Museums and Galleries (ACUMG) responded Oct. 5: “It . . . significantly compromises the future leadership of the museum since no credible professional would take a position with the knowledge that the permanent collection is viewed as a savior for fiscal issues.”
Soon after, a nonprofit advocacy alumnae group, Preserve Educational Choice (PEC), led plaintiffs in filing a lawsuit in Lynchburg Circuit Court to block the sale of the paintings. They successfully secured an injunction that prevented the works’ sale by Christie’s during its November 2007 auctions—raising $500,000 for the bond in less than two weeks. But this injunction expired several months later when the full $1 million bond could not be met. Escalating legal fees ultimately compelled PEC to suspend the litigation. To consolidate resources, the group focused on an earlier “charitable trust” case that challenged the college’s switch to co-education and that was on appeal before the Virginia Supreme Court. A favorable decision in that appeal might have protected the entire art collection, but in June 2008 the high court affirmed a lower court’s original dismissal of the case. One painting sold at auction last spring, while the other three await the same fate.


These events, which ignited a firestorm of controversy, started with a decision the Randolph College board of trustees made in September 2007, just one year after its equally dramatic choice to transform the 115-year old Randolph-Macon Woman’s College into a co-educational institution. To boost the school’s general operating endowment, and to respond to a December 2006 financial warning placed on the college by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), its accrediting agency, the board voted to sell at auction treasured paintings from the college’s Maier Museum of Art. The paintings represent a cross-section of the museum’s pre-eminent American art collection.
The repercussions of this decision have been far-reaching. More than two years of frequently contentious debate on campus preceded the proposed sale of the four artworks, all gifts of some kind that had been acquired to support the school’s academic program. Swift condemnation came from the museum world’s leading professional organizations, joined by prominent academics and curators who urged Randolph’s president and trustees to reverse the decision. Three long-time art department and museum staff members, including the authors, resigned on principle. Many patrons withdrew financial support from both the college and the Maier and changed their estate plans.
The board’s action attracted extensive press coverage and captured the attention of the art, museum, philanthropic and academic communities. Opponents have widely seen it as a breach of donor intent and public trust and as a blatant violation of the most basic tenet of the museum profession—the responsibility to nourish and preserve humanity’s cultural common wealth. Along with other high-profile deaccessioning controversies at Fisk University in Nashville and University of Iowa, the Randolph College case raises critical questions about how institutions of higher learning can preserve their cultural patrimony in hard times. This is a compelling, cautionary tale of the vulnerability college and university museums of any discipline face when their parent institutions treat their collections as financial assets rather than curricular resources.

In May 2008, five months after SACS removed its warning—and despite administrators’ own public acknowledgments that the school’s finances were improving—the college sold Tamayo’s Troubadour for a record $7.2 million to an unknown buyer at a Christie’s Latin-American auction. Administrative statements to the campus community and the press assert the college’s determination to sell the remaining three paintings, currently in the custody of Christie’s, “when [it] is most financially advantageous” for the school. During spring and summer 2008 shocked heirs, including Jane Forbes Clark, the granddaughter of Troubadour donor Stephen Clark, and Tamayo family representatives—who had never been contacted by the college—communicated their dismay to Virginia Attorney General Robert McDonnell, as well as to college leaders and the auction house. Most dramatically, Peter Reinthaler, heir to the donor of A Peaceable Kingdom, spoke out in a June National Public Radio broadcast and has even threatened legal action. At present, some litigation is still pending, particularly with regard to the fate of the $500,000 bond. Maier supporters continue to appeal to elected officials and to the attorney general to safeguard the rest of the museum’s permanent collection for future generations.



Founded by the college’s first art professor, Louise Jordan Smith (1867–1928), the collection that evolved into the Maier Museum of Art began in 1907 when the graduating class commissioned a portrait of the school’s president from William Merritt Chase. Believing that a well-rounded liberal arts education must include knowledge of the art of one’s time, Smith was determined to obtain world-class American paintings for a permanent collection at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, as it was originally known. In this visionary spirit, professors and students raised money to acquire Men of the Docks in 1920. This work became the cornerstone of a collection of outstanding quality and historical weight, which has served both the college and Lynchburg communities.
Endowed in 1983, the Maier Museum of Art became the centerpiece of a museum studies program and of a thriving academic community of studio and art history students and faculty. The museum’s outreach programs annually drew thousands of local schoolchildren. In recent years the Maier had increased annual attendance by more than 20 percent and membership by close to 30 percent. In the 2006–2007 school year, the museum saw 84 percent of the college’s student body come through its doors for class-specific activities across multiple disciplines. That same year, the museum hosted its 96th consecutive annual exhibition of contemporary art. The Maier’s success on campus was matched by its increased professional recognition in the larger art world, as it lent canonical paintings to major exhibitions at home and abroad and garnered competitive grants. Ironically, this growing prestige and national attention may have triggered the college’s interpretation of the art as a commodity, ultimately rendering the museum a victim of its own success.
The discussion of art as a financial asset emerged from a college-wide strategic planning effort that officially began in 2004, at the outset of a period of leadership transition. This planning process aimed to strengthen the school’s financial position, despite its general operating endowment of more than $150 million, one of the largest among private colleges in Virginia. The opening salvo was a spring 2005 request from the board’s strategic planning steering committee to the museum director for market value appraisals of the “most significant” works in the collection for what the academic dean characterized as “housekeeping” related to a review of the school’s assets. Throughout 2005–2006, trustees and administrators systematically referred to the paintings in financial terms. In a September 2005 faculty meeting, for example, college President Kathleen Bowman stated that the board was considering that the Maier’s art collection (along with the real estate of a study-abroad program in England and the college’s equestrian program) be “reinvested to support the directions of the strategic plan.” References to the art as “financial resources” and “assets” continued in administrative statements, describing it as physical property no different from any other object or investment—despite the fact that the art collection had never been capitalized in the college’s annual audit and had been a long-established part of the school’s curriculum.

This semantic transformation from art as “education” to art as “commodity” set art department professors, allied faculty and museum staff into both offensive and defensive positions, as they urgently sought to educate the board and senior college administrators about AAM-sanctioned standards and best practices and to defend the key role art plays in a liberal arts curriculum. Museum staff provided trustees and administrators with pertinent documents and codes and asked professional organizations to weigh in on the appropriate stewardship of museum collections. The Maier director and Margo Carlock, executive director of the Virginia Association of Museums, spoke in person to the full board. A group of professors, notably members of the art department, met with trustees repeatedly and wrote passionately to them, as well as to certain faculty who were in favor of selling art.
The art collection and co-education emerged as an either/or choice for the historically all-women’s school to boost its endowment. In June 2006, strategic planning consultants offered the school several possible scenarios, most notably: 1) the college remaining all-women (suggesting stagnation in recruitment) and selling the art (to compensate for relatively low single-sex enrollment) or 2) going co-ed (to increase enrollment) and not selling art (since increased enrollment would mean more financial stability). Following the trustees’ dramatic vote to adopt co-education in September 2006, these options soon morphed into a single solution forcefully advocated by trustees and senior administrators: embrace co-education and sell art to provide a financial cushion. This soon devolved into an inflammatory campus-wide debate over selling art versus keeping the college’s doors open.

The polarized atmosphere was exacerbated by the December 2006 probationary warning issued to the college by SACS, which cited the college’s high endowment spending rate, unsustainable tuition discounts and deferred maintenance as problems that needed to be addressed. This warning created a critical sense of urgency about the perceived need to sell paintings, even though the board had considered sale at least 18 months earlier and was moving ahead on a $30 million-plus athletic facility. With their attention fixed on the SACS warning, the board pressed its alumnae and faculty to strategize about how the art could be used to generate monies rapidly.
Fearful of losing significant parts of the collection to sale, concerned faculty proposed several practical, albeit problematic, solutions to maintain the collection’s core and its educational function within Virginia. Proposals to share ownership of key works with the University of Virginia or the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), however, did not prove fruitful. While negotiating with the VMFA, the board simultaneously pursued other strategies, such as courting Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton. This, along with the urgent climate on campus, prohibited the time and reflection needed to ensure the success of any sharing arrangements and prevented full exploration of other viable options such as a “Save the Bellows” fund-raising campaign proposed by alumnae (modeled on Philadelphia’s 2006 civic efforts to keep Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic there) or a partnership with the City of Lynchburg proposed by professors. In the end, the board voted to send paintings to auction.



Randolph College’s commodification of the Maier Museum’s art collection has far-reaching implications for all academic museums. The sale taints the reputation of an educational and cultural treasure built over generations through the vision, generosity and hard work of countless individuals. Because the art collection parallels the school’s respected history and is integral to its liberal arts mission, the sale damages the college’s academic integrity and, in essence, its identity. Sarah Cash, a former Maier director and now a curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, told the Washington Post in September 2007, “To break [the collection] up, in part or in whole, would be a huge disservice. . . . It’s like they’re undoing their own greatness.”

The community’s good faith is also at stake. The decision to sell art acquired as gifts and bequests for educational purposes disregards donor intent, thus undermining public trust in the institution. Commenting on the crisis, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) focused on this element, observing in an October 2007 news release, “The prohibition against the sale of collection objects for general operating purposes is a fundamental covenant between museums and donors. It is a promise that exists across generations, to prevent the financial challenges of a given time . . . from depriving future beneficiaries of such gifts.”
Perhaps the most immediate effects of the sale will be seen in the arena of donations. Even the first whispers of the possibility of selling art at Randolph College in 2005 prompted angry museum patrons to contact Maier staff and faculty, chiefly the authors, informing them of their intent to change estate plans, cancel memberships, withdraw the promise of pending gifts and even ask for earlier donations to be returned or routed to rival schools. Former college trustee Gene Mason wrote in a November 2007 letter to the editor in the Washington Post that the sale would prove “that the people in charge of the college have no regard for donor intent” and would “compromise the solicitation of major gifts by other charitable institutions in Virginia and other states.”
Even if wary donors and museum administrators at Randolph College and similar institutions craft more restrictive deeds of gift, it would not guarantee that college and university boards would not try to liquidate museum collections. While careful documentation may go a long way towards protecting future acquisitions, extant academic collections—most, like that at the Maier, largely unencumbered by specific donor instructions—are still vulnerable without legal protection. And while tightened donor restrictions would offer some safety, they also may have a long-term debilitating effect on a museum’s ability to appropriately deaccession from their collections in sanctioned ways to strengthen their holdings. Such restrictions could also fundamentally alter the delicately balanced relationship between museums and philanthropists that is a hallmark of the U.S. nonprofit community.
Overlaying the topic of donor intent is the issue of ownership. When donors give art or other artifacts to academic museums, one faces the question of who or what owns those objects and how to define ownership in legal and ideological terms. Some academic museums, particularly those associated with public institutions or those founded recently, have legal documents in place that clearly protect collections by insulating them from general school property. Most, however, do not—and this presents a real obstacle.
In the course of litigation to save the Maier paintings, Randolph College, a private institution, took the position that it owned the art like any other property and had the legal right to sell it without interference. College officials argued in a June 2008 op-ed in the Washington Times that it is not only their right but their ethical responsibility to sell property in order to save the entire organization—a concept reinforced by the college’s lawyers in an October 2008 op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This position is countered by the Virginia attorney general’s October 2007 amicus curiae brief recognizing the right of citizens to bring suit against nonprofit organizations they believe are not serving the common good.

Randolph College’s assertion of ownership of the Maier Museum’s paintings is also complicated by the fact that its professors, following policies outlined in the school’s faculty handbook and promulgated by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), share governance responsibilities with the board and have primary responsibility for the curriculum. If the paintings are part of the curriculum, then could not faculty be considered the intellectual “owners” of the art collection? “This collection was built painting by painting, with blood and sweat and tears from students, faculty, alumnae and the Lynchburg community,” former Maier Associate Director Ellen Agnew told the Washington Post in September 2007. “It belongs to the students of this college and to our community—not to the board of trustees.”
Equally troubling is the implication that museums at private schools have little to do with the public realm. It is critical for the leaders of all types of colleges and universities operating museums to understand that even the most well-endowed institutions cannot survive without the support of public grants and tax benefits. With museums’ greater dependence on federal, state and municipal support has come an expanded results-based expectation of public accountability from which academic museums have not been exempt. This concern arose in an August 2008 Wall Street Journal article on the University of Iowa regents’ interest in selling Jackson Pollock’s Mural from the school’s museum. “Perhaps the time has come,” Eric Gibson wrote, for federal granting agencies “to start enforcing professional standards” so that officials stop “strip-mining their collections to raise funds that, by rights, they should be soliciting from donors.”
At the heart of the Randolph College case is the issue of independence. Like many academic museums, the Maier historically operated under the supervision of the college’s dean. While the Maier’s relationship to the college administration had for decades been largely a fruitful one, efforts to achieve accreditation were thwarted partly by the administration’s reluctance to create a statement of permanence and clarify governance structures. In October 2007 the Maier’s identity as a recognized museum was diminished by board leaders’ rationalization, in an op-ed in the Lynchburg News and Advance, that “the Maier is a unique department of the college, not an accredited museum,” an interpretation offered to justify selling art and dismissing museum ethics. At present, the Maier’s status is further stunted by the fact that the college has declined to appoint a director and remaining staff must now report to the president’s office.
The conflict thus raises the issue of how much autonomy academic museums can or should reasonably have from their parent institutions. Should they maintain separate governing boards? Should they function under the purview of an academic dean or provost’s office, or be part of the institution’s development office? The University of Oregon, for instance, recently transferred oversight of its Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art from the provost’s office to the institutional advancement office, a move that prompted faculty opposition. How academic museums can best navigate the reality of answering to multiple authorities—a parent institution and professional organizations such as AAM whose ethos and standards may be contradictory—remains a challenge.
The staff of academic museums must confront the sobering reality that when a parent organization faces financial difficulty, its leaders may view art objects, artifacts, manuscripts or specimens as fungible commodities. This can happen with shocking speed and to the most venerable institutions. To protect against the unthinkable, whether accredited or not, academic museums should have written policies in place, archive their history, record their institutional commitment to core professional standards and consistently model sound ethical behavior. Detailed documentation of agreements, discussions and activities regarding gifts and bequests is critical.
Forthright communication must be in place among trustees, school administrators, museum staff and faculty. This cannot wait until a crisis erupts. Given the increasingly corporate nature of decision-making in higher education, museum staff and faculty need to educate administrators and trustees early in their tenure about the nature, function and responsibilities of museums. This must be an ongoing effort and can be profitably extended by the professional organizations that represent museums to the agencies that accredit colleges and universities. It is a mistake to assume that boards of institutions of higher learning automatically understand and accept the same professional and cultural values as their faculty and museum staff—especially in an economic downturn, when it can be too easy for boards to transform the pedagogic worth of rare objects into mere commercial value.
While the trustees of colleges and universities need to learn to respect museum ethics and best practices, museum staff and faculty should also become more familiar with the corporate habits and legal obligations of governing boards. Understanding the complexities of budgeting, fundraising and ensuring the welfare of all aspects of an organization can only help in discussions about a museum’s future. This issue is being addressed in new programs like the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York, long-established programs such as the Getty Leadership Institute, and executive and trustee leadership seminars offered by AAM, the Director’s Forum and the Museum Trustee Association.

Transparency is key to all aspects of decision-making. Secrecy in deliberations and planning runs counter to the latest standards and best practices for nonprofit organizations, including AAM’s. Much of the agony, ill will and confusion at Randolph College might have been avoided had genuine openness been embraced. Transparency is particularly critical with regard to board members’ professional connections to the larger museum world. College and university trustees and administrators making critical decisions about the fate of their academic museums who are themselves collectors or who sit on advisory boards or collectors’ groups of other museums have a de facto conflict of interest.

If a college or university board has made the problematic decision to use objects from a campus museum as a revenue-generating tool, what recourse do faculty and museum staff have? How can they best help trustees explore all feasible options in order to avoid ill-considered and irreversible decisions? In the absence of unequivocal legal protection and subject to a parent organization’s directives, an academic museum’s best protection may be simply consultation about developing problems with professional peers and the leaders of museum advocacy organizations. Such groups can provide invaluable aid and exert powerful public and private influence.
At Randolph College, the intense involvement of professional peers and organizations from the outset helped supporters raise large sums of money for legal efforts, attract national and international press, gain the attention of the highest court in Virginia, delay auction sales and keep the cultural worth of art at the forefront of the debate. While none of these results definitively stopped the sale of art, they effectively brought the issues of donor intent, public trust and museum ethics before a national consciousness and may, therefore, aid other museums in the future.

The Maier’s tragedy thus may in the end prove to be its triumph. Indeed, the impact of the scandal has already been felt, its example encouraging academic museums to secure more effectively the multifaceted collections entrusted to their care. The University of Iowa regents, for example, have decided not to sell a Jackson Pollock painting to pay for flood damage repair. Recent conferences sponsored by the College Art Association, the American Studies Association, AAM, the Center for Excellence in Higher Education and the American Bar Association have hosted spirited panels on the subject. AAM President Ford Bell announced at the 2008 conference of ACUMG that AAM will approach the accrediting agencies of colleges and universities about making the appropriate standards of museum operation part of the criteria for institutional assessment. While ACUMG’s 2007 conference focused on the spread of deaccessioning scandals at academic museums, its 2008 topic was geared toward pro-active self-protective efforts.
All of us—professors, curators, administrators and patrons—must continue to be vigilant in our efforts to craft persuasive arguments and to hold each other accountable to ethical standards. Only such actions will ensure that campus museums thrive as relevant and respected components of the country’s best academic communities.

Laura Katzman was director of the museum studies program and associate professor of art at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College from 1995-2007. She is now associate professor of art history at James Madison University. Karol Lawson was director of the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College from 1999-2007 and is currently interim director of the Sweet Briar College art galleries and adjunct assistant professor of arts management at the college.