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Museum Management and Curatorship

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Universities and Museums: Past,

Present and Future
Patrick J. Boylan
Published online: 11 May 2007.

To cite this article: Patrick J. Boylan (1999) Universities and Museums: Past, Present and Future,
Museum Management and Curatorship, 18:1, 43-56, DOI: 10.1080/09647779900501801
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Universities and Museums: Past, Present

and Future1
Patrick J. Boylan

Universities were amongst the earliest public institutions to develop museums

in a recognisably modern form, and university museums can be traced back to
the 17th century or even earlier. However, over the past half century, since the
end of the Second World War, museums have seen an explosive growth: at least
90%perhaps even 95%of todays museums across the world are younger
than our world body, the International Council of MuseumsICOM. Even in
highly developed countries with a long museum history, frequently two-thirds
or more of the total number of museums are recently created establishments.
Britain is probably typical: in the early 1980s it was estimated that on average
three new museums were opening every week.2 Because of the massive growth
in the number, range and variety of the worlds museums and galleries overall,
the proportion of these that are run by universities and similar advanced academic institutions has been substantially diluted in percentage terms. However,
today there are certainly more university museums and galleries in the world
than at any time in history, and among these are some of the most important
museums and collections in the world. For this contribution I want to explore
first the origins and the wide range of types of university museums which our
generation has inherited from the past. Then I will review some of the current
functions, activities and problems of present-day university museums, before
considering possible future relationships between universities, their museums
and their communities.
Some of the earliest recognisable museums were established within, and run
by, universities and other academies of learning. We know little in detail about
the earliest collections of academies and other university-like institutions, though
archaeological evidence has been found of several significant collections related
to academies in Mesopotamia, such as that at Lasa dating from the 2nd millennium BC, and the fairly closely dated museum rooms of around 530 BC found
in the excavations of a school at Ur.3 Little more is known of those of Classical
Antiquity, such as Aristotles Lyceum, established in the 4th century BC. However, it is clear that the kind of research carried out by Aristotle himself (which
included many original dissections and with over 500 species classified and
described) must surely have led to the development of teaching or demonstration collections in the original Lyceum. Likewise, much of the Aristotelian
science taught in such academies and embryo universities over the next 800 to
1,000 years at least, especially taxonomybiological classificationmust have

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44

Universities and Museums: Past, Present and Future

required access to real objects, even if only as exemplars of the classifications

and sciences being taught and researched.
Similarly we know little of the original Museon founded by Ptolomy Sotor as
part of the great Library and Academy of Alexandria, Egypt, in about 290 BC,
though this certainly survived for several centuries with, no doubt, ever growing
collections of works of art, antiquities and natural curiosities.4 Indeed, most if
not all of the nine Muses of Classical mythology must have been represented at
Alexandria and similar institutions across the Greek and Roman world. For
example, the large numbers of high quality Roman replicas of Classical Hellenic
sculptures that have survived show that sculptors and their academies must have
had comparatively easy access to either the originals ormore likelyto firstclass copies for use as models. To take just one example, it is clear that throughout the Hellenic and Roman periods portrait sculptures of famous figures of the
past and present were available in large numbers, and it seems more than likely
that academies devoted to particular philosophical traditions would have had
significant portrait collections, presumably on public displayas in the temples
and other public buildings for which we have archaeological evidence. I think
it is not too fanciful to envisage displays something like the remarkable portrait
sculpture collection covering so many of the great cultural and political figures
of Classical Greece and Rome which was built up in the 19th century by Arne
Jacobson in Copenhagen, and which is now displayed in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek museum which he and his family built and endowed in that city.
After the decline of the Library and Academy of Alexandriaitself a matter
of great controversylittle is known of the nature of academies and any collections these may have had until perhaps the 13th century when Classical texts,
such as Aristotle, long-lost at least in the West, were rediscovered and translated
into contemporary (Church) Latin by scholars such as the Dominican Albertus
Magnus, while the same century saw the beginnings of modern universities in
several European countries. These were originally essentially scholastic in style
in their earlier stages and depended largely if not wholly on library collections:
manuscripts, and in due course printed books, rather than artefacts, and hence
had little need of teaching collections, let alone museums in the modern sense.
Indeed, we know that through to at least the 17th centuryand even well into
the 19th century in many universities and academiesessentially practical or
observation-based subjects such as zoology, anatomy or geography were still
largely taught from books, predominantly Greek and Latin texts up to 2,000
years old, by Classical writers such as Aristotle, Galen, Pliny or Ptolemy.
However, in at least some of the growing number and range of universities
which developed in the Later Medieval period, a new (or perhaps more accurately, a rediscovered) style of study and learning began with the early stages
of the Renaissance. Almost certainly the first collections of artefacts to be built
up by the new universities would have fallen into two categories: religious and
ceremonial objects, and works of artespecially portraits of patrons and others
associated with the institution. Some such collections have, usually in comparatively recent times, been brought together as university or college collections. A
good example is the Picture Gallery of Christ Church College, Oxford, originally
founded in 1546, but which was turned into an outstanding small art museum
about 20 years ago.
The prevailing interpretation and application of Aristotelian natural sciences

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Patrick J. Boylan

45

and human anatomy were directly challenged by the mid-16th century Flemish
anatomist, Vesalius, notably at the University of Padua. He rejected the universal
and largely uncritical use of Galens 1400-year-old description of the human body
and developed instead his own well-illustrated book on human anatomy, based
for the first time on modern dissections. A subsequent major influence was the
Cambridge scholar (and later, politician) Francis Bacon, who between 1605 and
1623 sought to replace or at least update greatly Aristotles 2,000-year-old
approach with the direct exploration of nature and the wider world itself. He
gathered evidence very widely from practical observations of nature, arguing
Books must follow sciences, not sciences books.5 The research and enquiry
methods of Bacon were soon being widely adopted in contemporary exploration
of the Americas and of the shores of the Pacific and Indian Oceans and of the
African continent by Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and English
expeditions of discovery. Bacons methods were also soon adapted in the
emerging national academies such as Britains Royal Society, established in 1666,
some 40 years after his death.
The VesaliusBacon agenda was also taken up by a growing number of European universities, which had in any case from the late 16th century onwards
been showing a growing interest in both human anatomy and the natural
sciences. In the 17th century anatomical dissection became so common for
research and teaching purposes that the next century or so saw the building in
many universities of specially designed anatomy theatres for this purpose.
Within a few decades these were to be found in universities across Europe,
from the north, as at Uppsala in central Sweden, through the Netherlands, where
Rembrandt famously recorded The Anatomy Lesson in one of his most famous
major paintings, to France, as at Montpellier, and through to many of the great
Italian universities such as Bologna, Padua and Ferrara. By the late 17th or early
18th centuries other new scientific specialisms had begun to emerge in universities, such as comparative studies of the mineralogical and biological worlds.
Such studies made access to both facilities for practical research, such as dissections of human and animal material, and to comparative collections essential.
Early continental examples included the rich mineralogy and mining technology
collections of the Mining Academy at Freiberg in the Kingdom of Saxony, now
part of Germany, and the collection and study of marine zoology at Naples.
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries Christ Church, Oxford, already mentioned, housed the Universitys Anatomy School. Two continental scholars visiting Oxford reported in 1630 and 1631 on the natural curiosities held in the
Anatomy School building, and on the Gallery of archaeological objects and other
antiquities in the Bodleian (University) Library. These embryo museums were
also visited by King Charles II in 1681, and an inventory of the Anatomy School
collection prepared between 1705 and 1709 listed 386 specimens, though a
1710 German visitor, Z.C. von Uffenbach, reported the collections to be in
great confusion as well as full of dust and soot. This comment is in itself very
significant, in that it implies that Uffenbach was aware of the standards and
conditions which Oxford should have been providing, but was not.6
There seems to be little information readily available, at least in the present
authors working languages of English and French, concerning early developments in Spain, though by the beginning of the 17th century the University of
Valencia certainly had a justly famous Medical School with close links with the

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Universities and Museums: Past, Present and Future

tradition of Vesalius, who may well have taught there.7 It is therefore more than
likely that both practical and comparative anatomy would have been taught
there, implying the existence of at least some kind of collection for comparative
purposes. Also, one of the most comprehensive early scientific accounts of the
natural history of Latin America, prepared by the Academia di Lecce in Italy in
the early 17th century, would appear to have been based on substantial official
Spanish collections, but presumably assembled under the auspices of the Crown
rather than an individual university or academy.8
Probably the first completely new, purpose-designed, large museum (as
against art gallery) built anywhere, and certainly the first English public museum,
was Oxfords original Ashmolean Museum. The building, attributed to Sir Christopher Wren, opened in May 1683 to house the large collection brought
together by Elias Ashmole and donated by him to the University subject to the
condition that the University provide a suitable building for it. The collection
encompassed geology, zoology, ethnography and objects of antiquarian interest,
and also incorporated some earlier collections, most notably the private museum
created at least 30 years earlier in London by the botanist and horticulturist John
Tradescant.9 Here we see what became the most usual role and organisational
structure for traditional university museums. For over two centuries the Museum
was in effect an academy in its own right. Wrens building was designed and
used for not just the display and storage of ever-increasing museum collections:
it also accommodated the teaching staff for the academic subjects covered by
the Museum and the lecture and demonstration rooms for teaching and studying
of these. Over the following 300 years this model of bringing together of
museum collections, academic staff and teaching space to create what was virtually a small specialised academy in its own right was highly influential, and
over this period the pattern has been copied some hundreds of times over by
universities in every part of the world. Similarly, the earliest Keepers of the
Ashmolean Museum, Robert Plot followed by Edward Lhywd, undertook teaching and research within the University in addition to their museum duties, a
model which continues to the present day across all the Oxford University
Museums and, indeed, in the majority of contemporary university museums.
Though the geology and natural history collections were moved to a new Oxford
University Museum in 1860, and the remaining departments to the far larger
new Ashmolean Museum building in the 1930s, the Old Ashmolean Museum
building is happily still used as a working museum and as a research and teaching
institute in accordance with the original intention. Wrens building now accommodates both Oxford Universitys Museum of the History of Science and the
teaching facilities for the Universitys postgraduate studies in the history of
science.
Between the early 18th century and the latter part of the 19th century there
were a series of revolutions in knowledge of the natural world. This began with
the work of Linnaeus at the Universities of Uppsala and Leiden which established
from 1735 onwards modern systems of botanical and zoological classification.
This period ended with the general acceptance, in the fourth quarter of the
19th century, of Darwins theory of evolution and the establishment of modern
approaches to both comparative anatomy and taxonomy. In relation to the world
of antiquities, the same period saw first the development of principles of archaeological excavation and then, at the beginning of the 19th century, the establish-

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Patrick J. Boylan

47

ment of chronologies for the Egyptian, Biblical and Classical periods, while by
the middle of the 19th century there was a general acceptance of the system
of classification of Prehistoric periods first proposed by the Danish archaeologist,
Thomsen, in 1836. The Linnaean system of identifying and classifying the natural
world relied heavily on principles of direct comparison between an unknown
or unidentified new object and established standards, represented above all by
designation of type specimens, or other previously identified voucher specimens, by the original author of the scientific name of a species or other established category, principles which the emerging science of archaeology to a considerable extent adopted and adapted. This approach placed both reference and
teaching collections at the very heart of both research and teaching, and universities across the world quickly developed the necessary facilities in the form of
collections and museums.
Oxford University, already mentioned, was typical. Many decades of neglect
and decay had culminated in the burning in 1755 on the orders of the Oxford
University authorities of much of the natural history collections of the Ashmolean Museum, including the famous 17th century stuffed extinct giant flightless
pigeon of Mauritius, the Dodo.10 However, the introduction in the early years
of the 19th century of modern approaches to botany, zoology, mineralogy and
palaeontology using the Linnaean system meant that these areas of the Ashmoleans collections had to be quickly re-established. In 1818 William Buckland was
appointed to the newly created Regius Chair in Geology, based in the Ashmolean
Museum. By 1821 he had sorted, re-identified and catalogued the surviving Ashmolean Museum mineralogy and palaeontology collections, and was in addition
actively and rapidly expanding the collections by both his personal collecting
for the Museum in his own fieldwork and through a growing network of correspondents across many parts of the world. Meanwhile the newly re-ordered
Museum was filled with undergraduates, graduate students, university academic
staff and distinguished visitors for Bucklands celebrated twice weekly lectures
on mineralogy and geology respectively (Figure 1).11 Philip Duncan, curator of
zoology during the same period, similarly built up the zoological collections,
while at the Christ Church Anatomy School Henry Acland was doing the same
with collections of human and comparative anatomy.12 By the time of Bucklands
death in 1856 Oxfords geology, natural history and anatomy collections were
of such a scale and importance that they could no longer be accommodated in
the original Ashmolean Museum and Christ Church buildings, and by 1860 the
large new University Museum had been built to both accommodate the collections and the teaching of new Honours Degree courses in Natural Sciences.
Parallel developments in university museums were seen at many other universities during this period reflecting the central role of collections, and hence
museums, in research and teaching. Also in England, Cambridge University
developed substantial new museums of geology, zoology and archaeology, while
the new Victoria University in Manchester took over the long-established collections of the local Philosophical Society to create the Manchester Museum, still
owned and run today by the University of Manchester. In Scotland Glasgows
Hunterian Museum, originally the anatomical collection of John Hunter and
established in 1783, was similarly reformed and re-housed, while almost every
major German university created, or greatly expanded, their natural science

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Universities and Museums: Past, Present and Future

1. William Buckland, Professor of Geology, lecturing in the old Ashmolean Museum,

Oxford, 1823.

museums: typical examples survive down to the present day in, for example,
Bonn, Mu
nster and Tu
bingen.
Outside Europe, there were similar developments in North America at Harvard
University, to where the leading Swiss comparative anatomist and palaeontologist, Louis Agassiz, had been persuaded to emigrate with a view to developing
the collections and services of the Peabody Museum, while in Australia the University of Melbourne head-hunted the Director of the Irish Geological Survey,
MCoy, as its first Professor and Curator. He quickly built up there very large
research and teaching collections from his personal research collecting and
through extensive purchases through European dealers. As a result of this, large
numbers of Irish and German type specimens are still in Melbourne. In other
countries new university museums took on the role of national museums for
their own subject areas. Good examples are the national museums of natural
history and of archaeology of Norway, which wereand remainintegral parts
of the relevant academic departments of the University of Bergen, while at the

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49

other side of the globe, the Natural History Museum of La Plata, Argentina, has
a similar structure within the Universidad de La Plata, but also serves as a
national museum of natural history and palaeontology.
The 19th century also saw the emergence of university art museums. For
example, a past student of the University of Cambridge, the Viscount Fitzwilliam,
bequeathed an important collection of paintings and other works of art to the
University, together with funds to build a university art museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum opened in 1816. From its earliest days the Fitzwilliam served the
general public, unlike the great majority of university museums of the period,
which were primarily teaching and research collections, and this innovation
established a new and important trend. Subsequently large numbers of university
art museums have been established in almost every part of the world. As with
the Fitzwilliam Museum nearly two centuries ago, the starting point has in most
cases been the donation or bequest of an important collection to the university
concerned, to be used for the general cultural enhancement of the university,
its staff and students, and its local community, though in more recent times the
enhancement of the teaching of art history or fine art practice may have been
a further objective of the benefactor. Good examples include the Courtauld
Institute Collection and Gallery of the University of London, generously
endowed in the 1930s by the textile millionaire Samuel Courtauld to house his
excellent art collection, including many famous French Impressionist works. In
the 1970s, Paul Mellon similarly made an extraordinarily generous donation of
both works of art and money to create the Yale Centre for British Art at New
Haven, Connecticut, while Sir Robert and Lady Sainsbury similarly gave both a
collection and the money to build and establish the Sainsbury Centre for the
Arts at one of Englands newer universities, the University of East Anglia. Indeed
the period since World War II in particular has seen very many such developments, though usually of a more modest scale, in almost every part of the world,
as in the case of the innovative Krannert Art Gallery of the University of Illinois
(probably the first museum in the world to establish its own Internet site); the
Maltwood Museum and Arts Centre at the University of Victoria, Canada; Sydney
Universitys Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia; and the Hunt Museum
of Decorative Art at Limerick University, Ireland. It is notable that almost all of
this new generation of university museums have been basically art museums
as is the case in Alicante.
The present generation of university managements and university museum
curators across the world have inherited from past generations many hundreds
of university museums, of a bewildering variety and range, and very many of
these continue to offer a quite extraordinary range of both academic and wider
cultural services and roles. Those served by them include the traditional audiences: above all the students and academic staff of their own universities and
visiting researchers. However, many university museums are also increasingly
serving the general public at all levels, and have extended their traditional concern for the education of university students to the whole spectrum of the education system, from young schoolchildren through to both formal and informal
adult education. Taking Oxford again as an example, a total of over 530,000
visits are now made each year to the six university museums (Ashmolean, University Museum, History of Science, PittRivers Museum, Christ Church Picture
Gallery and the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments). A substantial majority

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Universities and Museums: Past, Present and Future

of this very large number of visitors must be ordinary members of the general
public rather than students or other specialists, and the university museums
together represent much the most important museum services for the county
of Oxfordshire including, of course, the City of Oxford itself.
This very success does, however, raise serious longer-term questions about
the role and especially the funding of university museums which have such a
prominent public role. In almost every country of the world the dominant economic dogma, reinforced by international measures and competition, calls for
major reductions in levels of subsidy from taxation, and moves towards a more
market-driven economy. Within this prevailing near-global economic and political philosophy a customerprovider culture is becoming widely accepted,
with potentially very serious implications for the post-World War II European
(at least) consensus that socially beneficial services such as health, social welfare,
education and culture should be a shared responsibility of society as a whole.
The British Prime Minister Margaret Thatchers determination to tear down
much of the contemporary social welfare state was memorably reflected in her
insistence that: There is no such thing as Society.13 This political and economic
dogma was taken up very enthusiastically by President Reagans government in
the United States of America and very soon also by highly influential international bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
In the United Kingdom it was the post-war Labour governments of 194551
and 196470 which progressively both abolished the traditional tuition fees for
university courses and introduced maintenance grants for university students.
However, the New Labour government elected in May 1997 has adopted the
prevailing consumerist view of education and is reintroducing university tuition
fees and replacing all student grants with repayable student loans. Adding this
to the major reductions in overall funding of universities already imposed by
the last government (equivalent to a cumulative reduction of perhaps as much
as 30% per student in less than 10 years by 1999) many British universities are
now questioning every item of what is often called non-core expenditure.
Within such financial reviews any service which is not central to these new
market-driven university economies must be very vulnerable, and this is certainly
true of the traditional role of many universities in serving the cultural needs of
a wider population in its local town or region, not just the fee-paying students
of the university itself. In Britain about 30 universities are currently receiving
small special grants from the Department for Education and Employment for
more than 100 such university cultural facilities, in at least partial recognition
of their wider responsibilities. These are mainly university museums which have
a substantial public service, rather than specifically student, role, though the list
also includes some university theatres, concert halls and arts centres. However,
there are probably at least four times as many university facilities of this kind
which are receiving nothing under this scheme. Also, the present university
museum special factor grants are in any case only temporary and not guaranteed in the long term, and even where they are received such grants usually
cover only a small part of the actual cost of running the universitys museums.
It is therefore not surprising that many British universities are now examining
very seriously whether they can continue to support their museums, and if so
what is the realistic level of support for them. There is therefore ever-increasing
pressure on the museums themselves to both cut both staffing and other costs,

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51

and to raise much more of their development and operational budgets from their
own resources, for example through fund-raising, more aggressive commercial
activity policies (museum shops and other trading activities, reproduction fees,
etc.) and from ever-higher admission charges.
Some universities, notably the University of Newcastle, have taken even more
drastic measures to relinquish responsibility for its museums. These have
included over recent years the sale of its important 19th century African and
Oceanean ethnographic collections and the transfer of its 150-year-old natural
history museum, the Hancock Museum, to the local City Council. Now the university is threatening to close its archaeological museumeven though this has
a central role in the teaching of the Universitys highly regarded degree courses
in archaeology and its recently established MA course in Museum Studies. There
is a further widespread threat to the continued support of some older university
museums, especially natural science museums, due to major changes in the
teaching and research of universities in many subject areas. It has to be recognised that since the late 1950s or early 1960s both biological sciences and geological sciences have undergone transformations at least as great as those
brought about by the introduction of modern systems of classification and then
the theory of evolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. Further, the speed of
these changes have been far greater than those of the 19th century: revolutions
of this scale in these sciences that took almost 150 years in earlier centuries
have this time taken only 15 to 20 years at the most.
As a consequence, nowadays, very little biological teaching or research takes
place at the level of the whole animal (except for example behavioural studies):
most is now at the level of the cell or even the molecule. In the earth sciences
the emphasis today is on structure and process, with dating and correlation
increasingly dependent on the analysis of plate tectonics and on physical and
chemical geochronology methods in place of the 200-year tradition of comparative stratigraphy dated by fossil correlations. Indeed, more than 10 years ago
one of the most distinguished and internationally recognised lenders of the new
generation of geologists reportedly argued that palaeontology teaching could be
dropped from the standard university geology syllabus, because it was no longer
relevant to the real geology of the contemporary academic and industrial
worlds.
There are similar problems emerging in relation to the often very large and
rich collections of university ethnography and anthropology museums. We have
to recognise that today an academic specialist in material culture studies is more
likely to be doing comparative research on the contents of the contemporary
domestic kitchens of different local social, cultural and ethnic groups than
researching the historic collections of so-called primitive art in the universitys
museum. Similarly, archaeology has to a large extent moved on from a somewhat
antiquarian focus on the rare or unique object to attempts to interpret past
environments and social systems as a whole, shifting the focus from the individual museum quality object to the interpretation and long-term storage in bulk
of the whole excavation archive. Further, and perhaps most significantly of all,
the new generation of leaders in sciences who have traditionally made heavy
use of their departmental and university museum, and in particular the senior
professors and heads of department (and who are still in very many cases the
titular directors or curators of university museums), now come from a gener-

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Universities and Museums: Past, Present and Future

ation which was itself never schooled in the traditional science of the heyday
of university museums and teaching collections. Not surprisingly, many believe
that their department no longer needs such facilities, except perhaps for nostalgic and sentimental reasons, and that in a period of rapidly declining financial
resources museums and collections are an expensive luxury that can no longer
be afforded.
There is, of course, still some very significant primary research of what might
be termed the traditional kind going on in university museums around the world,
and indeed the museums and their collections are themselves being recognised
as an important and legitimate areas of study in their own right. Across the
world such historical and collections research over the past few decades has
led to the rediscovery and re-identification, usually within museums themselves,
of many tens of thousands of historic specimens and collections of great significance in the history of natural sciences, archaeology, anthropology and of exploration. There are a growing number of major studies both within individual
universities and more widely which are identifying the sort of problems just
outlined, from London through to Australia. There, for example, a recent
national study has shown that perhaps two-thirds of the approximately 50
departmental museums of all kinds within the countrys universities no longer
have any professional staff and are not functioning at all, with the consequence
that often highly important collections rare in very real danger through lack of
professional care.14 However, here is some good news. In particular, university
art museums, both ancient and newly-created ones, seem to have avoided the
worst excesses of recent trends. Perhaps this is because art history itself is a
comparatively new and rapidly expanding academic discipline. However, much
more important is the fact that through lively programmes of exhibitions and
their presentation of perhaps very challenging kinds of contemporary art, university art museums are seen to serve the wider university community, not just
specialists in a particular academic discipline, and often the general public also.
A good example of this positive trend is the Museum of Contemporary Art at
the University of Sydney, Australia. This was established less than 20 years ago,
but has already become the de facto national museum of international modern
art for the whole of Australia.
Though much of what I have just argued will probably have been very
depressing and perhaps most inappropriate for the start of a series of lectures
celebrating the University of Alicantes new adventure, I do believe that there
is a very real future for university museums, both old and new. Further, I am
sure than many can, will, and indeed must, not just survive but flourish in the
new millennium. However, this will not happen by accident, so in my final
remarks I want to suggest some of the measures that will be needed in the
increasing difficult, in some cases definitely hostile, environment of the next
few years. In particular what are the ways in which universities and their
museums can counter the challenges of declining funding and the very real
revolutions in many of the sciences and other academic disciplines which have
traditionally supported the creation and maintenance of university museums?
My first imperative is a very obvious one: relevance. It is essential that the
museum in general, or a particular large and important collection within it, is
made relevant to present-day needs. This does not mean that areas of collections
or study which no longer relate to the current teaching curriculum should be

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abandoned, but the value and potential future importance of historic material
should be emphasised. Within the past few weeks [Autumn 1997] for example,
some DNA sequences have been successfully isolated from Neanderthal skull
fragments which have been held in a museum since 1867, and I have myself
(like many other present-day scientists) been able to reinterpret and solve the
problems of some apparently very puzzling early 19th century fossil assemblages
where the original deposit has long since disappeared, simply by re-examining
and re-identifying in detail collections made up to 160 years ago.15 Equally, the
recognition in February 1997 of a very modern style (and musical scale) bone
flute dating from around 43,500 BC in recent excavations of Neanderthal cave
deposits in the Dave Babe Cave, Slovenia, sent curators across Europe back to
their own collections knowing what to look for. As a result already more than
a dozen other previously puzzling perforated Palaeolithic bones, many found
decades or even centuries ago, have been recognised as flute-type musical instruments by comparison with the undoubted new example from Slovenia.16
University museums could also reposition themselves to serve, at least in part,
as museums of the history of the university itself, something that can be of great
public relations value to the universitys external image. Oxfords Museum of
the History of Science in the Old Ashmolean Museum building does this for
Oxford, while Glasgows Hunterian Museum similarly includes excellent displays
on the history of the Museum from the late 18th century and of the 600-year
history of the University itself. Similarly, the Sedgwick Museum of the geological
department of Cambridge University has carefully reconstructed the 18th century geological cabinet of the Universitys first Professor of Geology, John Woodward, and outlines the history of science, especially geology, teaching within
the university over a quarter of a millennium.
In the case of art museums the concept of relevance may usefully be applied
to the wider cultural role of the university in feeding the minds of students and
staff far beyond the increasingly narrow limits of their studies and research,
making the museum a lively and vibrant centre of the wider cultural life of the
university and its local or national community. At a time when potential students
have a quite bewildering range of universities to chose from in most countries,
one which can demonstrate in a very direct way its history and traditions, and
which can show that it offers a broad cultural environment, not just a narrow,
near-mechanical, training, is going to have a significant advantage in the recruitment marketplace.
My second imperative is co-operation, both within the university and outside
it. One solution to the problem of orphan collections left behind when, for
example, there are major changes in the teaching, research or organisation of
a particular subject may be to create joint facilities for these between different
departments of the university or between different institutions. This was done
at a national level with British geological collections and museums in the early
1990s. With special government grants through the universities funding body
about six national centres were created within enlarged geology departments
in the universities concerned. High quality new or modernised and enlarged
buildings, together with specialist staff, were provided and funded, and both
the research collections and surplus teaching collections of over 40 smaller
departments or units were moved to these. In the same way there has been a
recent study to see whether perhaps the 50 or more museums and collections

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Universities and Museums: Past, Present and Future

of the different colleges of the University of London could adopt joint policies
and share professional staff.17
Similarly, where the museum has a substantial public role extending far
beyond the university community itself, co-operation with the relevant local or
regional government authorities is likely to become essential. For the reasons
explained previously, in the face of declining budgets there is going to be everincreasing resistance within universities to the use of scarce funds to provide
services to people other than the universitys own students and staff. This is
already being recognised in some places. For example, for a considerable number of years successive local authorities in Manchester, England, have made
grants and have loaned school teachers to the University Museum and its Art
Gallery in recognition of, and to support, their work with the general public,
and in Oxford the Ashmolean similarly had school teachers on loan from the
local education authority for some years. Obvious partnerships with local authorities, and with other tourist attractions, are in the field of marketing and promotion. Again this is happening in many places across Europe: increasingly the
university museum is able to make a contribution in kind, though providing
World Wide Web and other Internet promotional services using academic networks and the universitys web servers and Internet expertise.
My third imperative is autonomy. Far too many university museums and their
collections have little or no legal status or protectionsomething which has
become apparent with the successive problems at Newcastle University already
referred to above. Also, in very many cases the museum still remains nominally
at least the responsibility of a senior professor within the particular academic
subject area who may have no expertise (or even interest in some cases) relevant
to the collections or the work of the museum. Every university ought to establish
both a proper legal structure with some form of management board or trustee
body for each university museum or for the universitys museums and museum
and art collections as a whole. This governing body should be drawn widely
from different parts of the university, and with at least some members drawn
from the wider local community to represent the interests of the general public
where the university museum has a public role as well as an academic one.
Further, the governing body must not be some sort of isolated private club
restricted to specialists, experts and other enthusiasts.
Alongside this, the university should make the necessary arrangements for the
actual professional management of either each individual university museum or
collection separately, or perhaps for a single, integrated, professional service
with properly qualified and experienced curators, conservatorrestorers, technicians, and administrative and finance staff to serve all of the universitys
museums.18 Close contacts and co-operation with other museums, both locally
and nationally, and in the museums own specialisation internationally must also
be a priority. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) in particular offers
one such network for professional support and information exchange across an
almost bewildering range of different types of museum through its 15 collection
or academic subject based international committees (such as Archaeology &
History, Ethnography, Fine Art or Natural History) and 12 interdisciplinary committees (such as Conservation, Documentation, Management, Training or
Security).
Finally, but by no means least, university museums need a period of at least

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stabilisation even if, in the present national and international financial climate,
expansion is rarely a practicable option at the present time. In a period when
many university museums are facing a very difficult future, it is extremely
encouraging to see the City and University of Alicante embarking on their
present adventure: building an innovative University Art Museum which will not
only serve the growing university campus and community, but will also be a
most important public resource for the City and its region. Museums have been
one of the important symbols of academic excellence and commitment in universities for several centuries and a valued part of the learning and cultural
experience of students and the universitys wider community. With the enthusiasm and goodwill that have been invested in the new University of Alicante Art
Museum I am sure that it will succeed.
Footnotes
1. This paper is based on the opening contribution to a series of public lectures on universities
and museums at the University of Alicante, Spain in 1997 and 1999, linked to the building of a
major new university art museum on the Universitys campus (I y II Journados de Museos,
Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, 1999). The brief for the 7 November 1997 inaugural lecture
in the first series was to explore the overall relationship between universities and their museums,
in the past, today, and in the future, in contrast with that of subsequent speakers in the two
series who have been mostly invited to discuss their own university museums.
2. For general discussions of the phenomenal growth of museums since World War II, see, for
example, Baghli, S.A., Boylan, P. and Herreman, Y. (1998) The International Council of Museums
(ICOM) 19461996: Fifty Years in the Service of Museums and their Development. International
Council of Museums, Paris; Boylan, P. (1990) Museums and cultural identity. Museums Association
Presidential Address 1990. Museums Journal 29-33 (December); and Boylan, P. (1997) Les
musees face `a la decroissance. In Perspectives Nouvelles en Museologie/New Trends in Museum
Practice, ed. M. Cote and L. Ferrara, pp. 1741. Musee de la Civilisation, Quebec.
3. Concise, though very good, introductions to the earliest origins of museums and collections in
early academies and universities, from Classical times onwards, are the chapters Museums and
their precursors and Museums in Britain by Geoffrey Lewis (pp. 546) and University Museums
by Alan Warhurst (pp. 93-100) in Thompson, J. (Ed.) (1992) Manual of Curatorship: a Guide
to Museum Practice, 2nd edn. Butterworth-Heinneman, Oxford.
4. The Library of Alexandria and its Museon have been reviewed extensively in recent years as part
of the UNESCO-supported project to recreate its original spirit in a new Library at Alexandria;
see, for example, El-Abbadi, M. (1990) The Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria.
UNESCO/UNDP, Paris.
5. Bacon, F. (1630) Proposition touching Amendment of Laws. The Elements of the Common Lawes
of England. London.
6. Davies, K.C. and Hull, J. (1976) The Zoological Collections of the 0xford University Museum:
A Historical Review and General Account. University Museum, Oxford.
7. Dr Alex Keller, personal communication.
8. Manual of Curatorship, op. cit. (note 3 above).
9. Macgregor, A. (Ed.) (1983) Tradescants Rarities. Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean
Museum, 1663, with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
10. Davies, K.C. and Hull, J., op. cit. (note 6 above).
11. See, for example, Rupke, N.A. (1984) The Great Chain of History: William Buckland and the
English School of Geology, 18141849. OUP, Oxford; Boylan, P.J. (1980) William Auckland
(17841856): scientific institutions, vertebrate palaeontology and quaternary geology. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leicester, 2 vols. The 1823 Hullmandel lithograph of Buckland
lecturing in the Museum (Figure 1), probably intended for the 2nd edition of Bucklands classic
Reliquiue Diluvianae of 1822 (reprinted in 1824), has been discussed in detail in Boylan, P.J.
(1970) An unpublished portrait of Dean William Buckland, 17841856. Journal of Society for
the Bibliography of Natural History 5, 360354.
12. Davies, K.C. and Hull, J., op. cit. (see note 6 above).

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13. Margaret Thatcher, in several broadcast interviews and speeches ca. 1997. In written form the
first use is ascribed by Jay, A. (1996) The Oxford Book of Political Quotations, University Press,
Oxford, to an interview in the British weekly magazine Womans Own, 31 October 1987.
14. University Museums Review Committee (1996) Cinderella Collections: University Museums
and Collections in Australia. Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, Canberra.
15. For example, Boylan, P.J. (1967) The Pleistocene Mammalia of the Sewerby-Hessle Buried Cliff.
Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society 36, 115126; Boylan, P.J. (1981) A new
revision of the Pleistocene mammalian fauna of Kirkdale Cave, Yorkshire. Proceedings of the
Yorkshire Geological Society 43, 263-280.
16. The Neanderthal flute from the Dave Babe Cave, Slovenia, fabricated from the femur of a halfgrown cave bear (Ursus speleaus) and both its context and musicological significance, was the
subject of a substantial exhibition in the National Museum of Slovenia, Ljubljana, through the
spring and early summer of 1997, supported by an exhibition leaflet. A full published report is
in preparation. Many museums rapidly re-examined their collections of fossil mammal bones
from Middle and Upper Palaeolithic sites for perforations that had previously been regarded as
accidental or carnivore gnawings to see whether these bones were in fact more fragmentary
remains of similar flute-type musical instruments, following the announcement of the Slovenian
discovery in the international press (e.g., The Times 5 April 1997; Science Magazine 11 April
1997, p. 203), and on the Internet (e.g., Robert Finks 1997 World Wide Web page: Neanderthal flute: oldest musical instruments 4 notes matches 4 of Do, Re, Me scale: a musicological
analysis: http://www.webster.sk.ca/greenwich/FL-COMPL.HTM). In discussion of my own presentation on the Dave Babe flute at a joint meeting of the Geological Curators Group and the
Society for the History of Natural History in the Torquay Museum in May 1997, staff of the
British Museum reported that as a result of such re-examinations of collections up to 150-yearsold in various European museums, several dozen similar bones dating from around 20,000 BP
to 10,000 BP had already been re-attributed, including some in the British Museum itself.
17. Since the original lecture was given in November 1997, University College London has created
a College-wide Centre for Museum, Collection, Heritage and Conservation Studies which brings
together the curatorial and related staff of all College museums and collections (some of which,
such as the Petrie Museum of Egyptology, are of international importance), together with the
teaching and research staff of the Colleges museum-related courses, particularly those of the
Universitys Institute of Archaeology (Dr Nick Merriman, personal communication). This initiative has been supported by the award by the College authorities of a significant increase in
museum and collection funding, and has also created new opportunities for internships and
practical projects for students on the Institute of Archaeologys highly regarded postgraduate
museum studies and conservation courses. This offers an excellent model for curatorial and
academic co-operation elsewhere.
18. This is another longer term objective of the University College London initiative (see note 17
above), with the prospect of fairer systems of pay and working conditions, and the development
of training opportunities and career development prospects that are impracticable when individual museums or collections have perhaps just a single member of staff.