LEISURE & ARTS

Small Departure, Large Problem
The Smithsonian Institution needs an entirely new modus operandi.

BY ERIC GIBSON
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.

The only surprise in Monday’s news that Smithsonian Institution
Secretary Lawrence M. Small had resigned is that it hadn’t happened
sooner.

The reason for Mr. Small’s departure was the fallout on Capitol Hill
from an inspector general’s report that showed him billing the
Smithsonian for such lavish expenses as first-class air travel and
home maintenance costs–albeit with the approval of the Board of
Regents, the Smithsonian’s governing body. Mr. Small might have
weathered this storm as he had others during his seven-year tenure
were it not for threats by Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and others
on the Hill to freeze a $17 million increase in the Smithsonian’s 2008
budget unless Mr. Small’s office changed its ways.

Mr. Small, who came to the Smithsonian from Fannie Mae after many
years at Citibank, has opened two new museums, renovated two others
and raised about $1 billion.

Yet for much of his tenure, it seemed he could not get out of bed
without igniting some controversy. Early on he caused uproar by
promising big donors control over the way their monetary gifts were
used, thus blurring the traditional church-state boundary between fund
raising and programming. He allowed General Motors and other
corporations to muddy the distinction between sponsorship and
commercial advertising. He installed as head of the renovated National
Portrait Gallery not an art historian but cultural historian Marc
Pachter, who blithely admitted to Lee Rosenbaum, for an article on
this page, that "I personally don’t do brushstrokes."

Things weren’t much better outside the Smithsonian, where Mr. Small’s
personal life repeatedly cast a pall over the institution. In 2004 he
was convicted of buying art containing feathers from birds on the
Endangered Species list, and then got into a tussle with the judge on
what form his community-service sentence should take. Last year, a
government report implicated him in the Fannie Mae scandal.

So now the Smithsonian must search for a replacement. Early reports
that Sheila P. Burke, a former political operative (she was once
Sen. Robert Dole’s chief of staff) and currently the Smithsonian’s
chief operating officer, is a serious contender for the post are not
reassuring. The Smithsonian doesn’t need another leader from outside
the world of the arts and sciences and unfamiliar with the unique
culture of the nonprofit world. What’s called for now is a figure in
the mold of the Carnegie Endowment’s Vartan Gregorian, who in stints
running Brown University and (most famously) the New York Public
Library showed that it is possible to raise money and maintain an
institution while keeping faith with the values it embodies.

But overdue as it was, Mr. Small’s departure will amount to very
little unless it becomes an occasion to address some longstanding
problems. The first is the Smithsonian’s governance.

As the preceding résumé shows, the Board of Regents should have picked
up on plenty of warning signs that Mr. Small was more of a liability
than an asset. Or was he? Whatever his failings as an administrator,
he certainly knew how to raise money, and it’s hard to escape the
conclusion that as long as Mr. Small kept the checks coming in, the
Regents were only too willing to look the other way. At least until
his actions threatened the support of the Smithsonian’s primary source
of funding: Capitol Hill.

More fundamentally, there is the Smithsonian’s governing structure
itself. The Board of Regents is headed by the chief justice and
includes the vice president and assorted members of Congress along
with a number of private citizens. Whatever luster these public
officials add to the Smithsonian’s letterhead, it’s unrealistic to
expect them to exercise meaningful oversight given their other
responsibilities. (Oh, to have seen Chief Justice Roberts’s expression
when he learned that, besides running an entire branch of government,
he was responsible for 18 museums and research facilities, plus a
zoo.)

Beyond governance, the Smithsonian’s entire basis of operations needs
review. At the moment, Congress provides some 70% of it’s roughly $1
billion annual budget, with the institution itself responsible for the
rest. That may be an enviable figure to some (public largess to most
cultural institutions amounts to far less), but it so limits the
Smithsonian’s other revenue-raising options that it’s like wearing
golden handcuffs. Close the gap by charging admission like other
museums? Out of the question, says Congress. Visitors have already
paid admission with their taxes. One previous secretary who floated
that idea was warned that for every penny the institution took in at
the gate, Congress would dock its appropriation accordingly.

This is the financial environment Mr. Small was forced to operate
in. You can criticize his fund-raising methods, his often skewed sense
of priorities and his insensitivity to the intellectual culture of the
Smithsonian. But under the circumstances, what choice did he have
other than to aggressively cultivate private and corporate donors?

The Smithsonian doesn’t just need a new secretary. It needs an
entirely new modus operandi.

Mr. Gibson is The Wall Street Journal’s Leisure & Arts features editor.

Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.