After five years as head of the Smithsonian Institution, former Georgia Tech president Wayne Clough has discovered that a skill common to all university presidents — fund-raising — has become one of the critical elements of his toolkit.
Federal spending cuts took $42 million out of the Smithsonian’s budget in a time when the organization is struggling to make the leap into digital media. The Smithsonian already generates about 40 percent of its budget from private sources. Clough said it will bolster that income stream soon with the Smithsonian’s first national fundraising campaign.
“We need more donors,” he said during a recent trip to Atlanta.
Slim and fit at 71, his white hair complemented by a neatly trimmed white beard, Clough spoke during a meeting at the Capitol City Club downtown. He is in Atlanta this week, where he still keeps a home, to meet with potential donors, to speak at a Rotary Club function on Monday and to spread the message of the Smithsonian’s extraordinary mission, which he says, is nothing less than to serve as the “memory of the country.”
That memory is preserved in 19 museums, the National Zoo and in relationships with 180 other museums around the country, including eight in Georgia.
Clough took time to speak about artwork and other Smithsonian objects that will be appearing in Georgia museums in the near future, and addressed how museums will change in a world of instantaneous information.
On remaining relevant in a digital world:
Attendance at the Smithsonian’s museums (30 million) has increased by 5 million in the past five years, he said, which demonstrates that people will always want to see such objects as Amelia Earhart’s airplane or the Hope diamond.
“I think they’ll always be relevant,” he said of museums. “No matter how great your image is, and you’re sitting there on your iPad and you can rotate it and all that kind of stuff, it’s still not the same as going to a museum … Also, if you want to do something with your family, it’s hard to do it on an iPad.”
On whether he is ever tempted to try on Abe Lincoln’s top hat:
“They don’t let me in this area by myself,” said Clough. “There’s always a curator standing by. And curators are very appropriately possessive of the objects they are tasked to take care of. Let’s take the ruby slippers (from the movie “The Wizard of Oz”), or Harriet Tubmans’ shawl: You want that object to exist a thousand years from now. If you let people like me touch it, you get the oils from your hands on these things.
On what he learned from Tech that applies to his work at the Smithsonian:
Both organizations are learning institutions, both sponsor research, both are supported by public and private funds, so the commonalities are more significant than one might think, said Clough. An example, he said, would be the Jefferson Bible exhibit, now at a museum in Denver, which features a one-of-a-kind volume, hand-bound by Thomas Jefferson, in which he assembled sections of the Bible that he reproduced in four languages.
“For any exhibition, like the Jefferson Bible, there is a tremendous amount of scholarship that went behind it. That exhibit may have taken four years to get together. To restore it, it turns out that Jefferson used 12 different kinds of ink. We don’t know why, but you can’t start fooling around with a document unless you know all that. We had to know what kind of paper he was using, because the paper was cracking and we had to restore the paper.”
The differences between running Tech and running the Smithsonian:
The Smithsonian has 137 million objects to take care of and a customer base that includes the entire country.
On Smithsonian exhibits coming to Atlanta in the future:
In December the Michael C. Carlos Museum on the Emory University campus will host “Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey,” featuring nearly 500 works by the famed African-American artist.
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