The Sabotage of The Semitic Museum

I have before me, as I write, the March-April 1982 issue of Harvard Magazine. Inside is an article recounting the history of the University's Semitic Museum which, after forty years of its dispersion, was at that moment to "rise again." Now, a scarce decade later, the museum's holdings are once more to be scattered, with many of its functions to cease entirely. All ten of its staff have already been fired. This is an ugly story.

In adding both context and detail to that story let me admit that I am a friend of the museum: I have chaired committees for two of the museum's most splendid exhibitions ("Judaica from the Vatican Library" and "The Silver Calf from Ashkelon") and was a member of the committee for a third ("The City of David: Discoveries from the Excavations"). I acquired for the museum the photographs by the rediscovered 19th century photographer M.J. Diness now on exhibit until December 18. My bias for these undertakings notwithstanding, the facts are the facts.

Begun with a contribution from the great philanthropist and financier Jacob Schiff in 1889, Harvard's Semitic Museum enjoyed the support of Schiff and others, including President Eliot. But with Eliot's retirement in 1909 and his death 17 years later, the museum was in for rougher times. As Harvard Magazine delicately put it, President Lowell was "unaccountably hostile" to it--so hostile, in fact, that in 1926 he prohibited the curator from raising any funds for the museum at all. (The Harvard president who initiated the numerus clausus for Jewish students, Lowell was also unaccountably hostile to the appointment of Louis Dembitz Brandeis to the Supreme Court. But, then, he was unaccountably hostile to almost anything that smacked of Jews.)

In an institution committed to the organizational principle of "every tub on its own bottom," Lowell's interdict against seeking donors was a terrible omen, one that would re-emerge some six decades later when the museum's director, professor of archaeology Lawrence Stager, would not raise money himself and barred others from doing so besides. But this jumps ahead of the story a bit.

During World War II the U.S. military took over several Harvard buildings, including the Semitic Museum. Thus began the museum's forty-year exile. Gradually, its collections were distributed here, there and everywhere: to a warehouse, to a Wellesley College professor's home, to other Harvard facilities, to a crawl-space under the Brandeis University library, to scattered basements and attics. Some holdings were actually destroyed. Then, in 1970, anti-war protesters detonated a bomb in the museum, which for 12 years already had been the home of the Center for International Affairs. Found in the rubble of virtuous indignation was one of the world's largest collections of early Middle Eastern photographs, a treasure in its way as great as the archaeology and ethnographic materials which first gave the museum its reputation.

Some time after his arrival here from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago eight years ago, Professor Stager was made the director of the museum. Put starkly, he had zero interest in the work it did. A learned but extraordinarily narrow specialist, he saw the space and the moneys the museum uses as assets he could annex to his own archaeological enterprises. In this sense his war against the museum is an easily understood university quarrel. It's what one Harvard wag calls "space imperialism."

But the department with which the museum is associated, the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is more than just archaeology. There are lodged almost all the University's faculty involved in Arab, Jewish, Turkic and Persian history and culture. I can see why an archaeologist fixed on the ancient world might feel alien from exhibits like "Danzig 1939: Treasures from a Destroyed Community," which reopened the museum, or from "The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe," created to celebrate the University's 350th anniversary in 1986. The same might be said for "Palms and Pomegranates: The Costumes of Saudi Arabia" or "Monumental Islamic Calligraphy."

But these were ventures done with cooperation of other NELC faculty. Moreover, the museum was conceived for just such activities, that is, to promote "knowledge of Semitic history and civilization, so that the world shall better understand and acknowledge the debt it owes to the Semitic people." Or, as it was put elsewhere, the museum was to "attract the general public and promote greater understanding of the civilizations of the Near East and its great cultural legacy."

This it has done, stimulating scholarship in the University, and enhancing study and interest beyond it. Another matter: The Semitic Museum has been for more than a decade one of those few places in the world where Jews and Arabs, Israelis and their Middle Eastern neighbors have consistently worked together beyond the rancors of politics on matters of common inheritance. The exhibition now on view at the museum and curated by Nitza Rosovsky, for example, was to go next year to the Muslim Waqf's Islamic Museum in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Save for the Silver Calf exhibit, which presented discoveries from Stager's dig in Israel, the director of the museum has not been involved in the museum's activities. Staff members hardly remember staff meetings. The ongoing public life of the Semitic Museum was mainly the achievement of Father Carney Gavin, its chief curator, and of his coworkers.

Stager just doesn't like Gavin, and he has shown this dislike in many ways, not least by denying him a cost-of-living salary raise virtually automatic at Harvard. After Gavin initiated grievance procedures, the raise was finally granted. But the procedures revealed that Stager had done what we're all told as children not to do: He read other people's mail, filched files, and disassembled hi-tech machinery to get evidence against Gavin.

Among the materials Stager discovered was correspondence between Gavin and me. Now, President Neil L. Rudenstine and Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles have assured me that this correspondence won't be in the public records. Alas, they seem not to understand the issue at hand. I'm not at all embarrassed about the contents of this correspondence; I care not a fig whether it is or is not in the public record. I was simply helping the Semitic Museum collect money from a donor who had committed to give more than he had actually turned over.

The issue at hand, then, is that the director of the museum, a tenured member of the faculty, has violated privacy rights guaranteed to all staff members by University rules. He has also tried to silence them, insisting that whatever they say to the public they clear with him, as if the right of free speech does not extend to 6 Divinity Avenue.

The dean chose Stager to head the committee which was to review the museum's work and recommend for the museum's future. It is strange that the director of the museum should have been the person to lead an inquiry into how it has fared under his stewardship. This was a set-up, but with a twist. Stager wanted the museum not exactly to fold, but to contract radically. Two members of his committee, moreover, would be beneficiaries of this contraction: As directors of the Fogg and Peabody museums, they are to inherit the parts of the collection which Stager wants to dispose of. Neither of them has examined the holdings soon to fall under his jurisdiction. These institutions and the other likely legatee, the Houghton Library, have full and important agendas of their own. The odds are that the artifacts and records of Semitic peoples will not absorb much of their energies or space. The dispersion of the collections to people and centers not much interested in them dooms them. That this should happen a second time in the history of the Semitic Museum, so soon after it was exhumed from its previous shabby interment, should be an embarrassment to the present president and dean. What motivated them to condone the boundless zeal and willfulness of one faculty member?

The museum now has a cumulative deficit of roughly $1 million. This is not a casual matter. It is urgent for the dean and the president, and it should be urgent for friends of the museum, too. But part of the responsibility for the deficit, surely, lies with the director who raised no money and then exploited the scarcity of funds as a reason to strangle the museum entirely. Another part of the responsibility lies, of course, with those who spent money they didn't have. But what neither the report not the dean, in acting on the report, does is to investigate whether funds to set the museum on sound financial footings might really be available. We know why Professor Stager didn't want the museum on such footings, and, by the way, he has made his feelings known to prospective major donors. But the dean? And the president?

In my view, there is a large and growing constituency for the Semitic Museum. Both University Hall and Massachusetts Hall should have known (and probably did) that there is still the prospect of a transfer of nearly $1.5 million from a private foundation to the museum. There are other pockets, and deep ones, too.

No one smart and rich, however, would give large sums to the museum without the blessings of top university officials; in recent times especially people didn't give large sums precisely because they feared these blessings would be withheld. You don't have to be around Cambridge very long to know that when the president and the dean want to encourage a project, they have funds to do so, and that they do so decisively all the time. Still, this is not absolutely essential. But they have also withheld the essential blessings without which Harvard fundraising never succeeds. They now tell us the incandescent light which was the Semitic Museum is to be snuffed out. The reason? No money. Big surprise.

Martin Peretz is a lecturer on social studies and is editor-in-chief of The New Republic.