The unhappy board members of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis are still responding to the announcement last week by Brandeis Provost Marty Krauss that the university, which has been thinking of selling off some of the collection, will continue to operate the Rose as a museum — at least through the summer. Last week Jon Lee, the chairman of the Rose Board of Overseers, issued a statement to his board members. Yesterday the Rose Board issued a statement of its own to explain its problems with the approach Brandeis is now taking.
The depth of feeling right now on the part of the museum board towards the Brandeis administration is pretty plain. The main points of the statement are these:
“When the Rose family originally founded the Rose Art Museum, they were very clear about its mission and the integral role it would play as a part of the Brandeis community,” said Meryl Rose, a member of the Rose Art Museum’s Board of Overseers and a relative to the original museum founders. “A museum with a collection and reputation such as the Rose needs a director, and while Krauss’s letter states that the collection will be cared for, it does not erase the fact that the Rose as we know it will cease to exist under the administration’s current plans. The administration is carrying out an elaborate charade, the first step of which is to turn the Rose from a true museum as its founders intended, into something quite different.”
Two months after first announcing and then restating its intentions to close the Rose and sell off the artwork, the University released the mandate for its “Committee for the Future of the Rose.” The group was established by Brandeis in the wake of its announcement that the Rose Art Museum would be closed and the Museum’s art collection─valued at approximately $350 million─would be sold to defray the University’s operating expenses.
According to Brandeis, the committee is designed to “explore options” for the future of the Rose, but is specifically prohibited from determining the fate of the works of art that are the heart of the institution, leaving that to the administration and Brandeis Board of Trustees. Although the committee includes representatives from various constituencies, including the Rose Art Museum Board of Overseers, members were hand-picked by the administration and the Rose was not allowed to choose its own representative.
“By forming the committee, Brandeis has turned a blind eye to the fact that the Rose already had an active board, in the Rose Art Museum Board of Overseers, to map out its future,” said Rose. “For decades, the museum has also had in place highly acclaimed programming and a dedicated staff to oversee its priceless collection.”
“What is also terribly saddening to us,” continued Rose, “is the role the Brandeis Board of Trustees played in this matter. We know that the trustees have only the best interests of the University at heart. They care about the arts, as many of them sit on the boards of prestigious arts institutions. Unfortunately, they have been led astray by a disingenuous administration motivated to push an agenda that involves looting the school’s culture to simply balance the books.