‘A Monument to the Best’

Running one of the world’s most important cultural institutions isn’t all that different from running a college, says Daniel H. Weiss, especially if you think of the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a “cultural university.”

He would know.

A former president at Lafayette and Haverford Colleges, and before that a dean at the Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Weiss is now president and chief executive of the Met. He oversees an institution with more than 100 curators, the world’s largest art-conservation laboratories, and a scholarly press that publishes 30 to 35 books a year, not to mention a collection of 5,000 years of art from hundreds of cultures.

Mr. Weiss, 60, is a historian of medieval art by academic training (he returned for his Ph.D. after first getting an M.B.A. and working as a business consultant). But the framed works on his office walls reflect his broader interests. They include paintings from the Met collection by Andreas Achenbach, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, and Alfred Sisley, and also the original typewritten copy of a poem by a U.S. Army major, Michael Davis O’Donnell, who was shot down in Southeast Asia in 1970 at age 24 during the Vietnam War. Mr. Weiss, who has written and edited books on art history and higher education, is working on a book about O’Donnell and the American experience during that war.

Mr. Weiss spoke to The Chronicle about the role of cultural institutions in the age of Trump, the value of shared governance, and why the college presidency isn’t the job it used to be. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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When you find a spare 20 minutes, are there spots in the museum you like to go and spend some time?

There are. I’ve had a relationship with this museum most of my life as an art historian. When I would come to New York as a college president, I would come to the Met. Every course I ever taught at any university or any college, in Haverford or Lafayette, and Johns Hopkins, I brought here. So I have favorite places that I have historically loved. The Greek and Roman galleries are the most beautiful spaces in the world to see Greek and Roman art.

But one of the great joys of this job is learning about things I haven’t seen before. And I have new favorite places as a result: The American Wing. I’m very partial to Hudson River landscape painters. And I love Rembrandt. This is a big neighborhood — the largest art museum in the world in terms of the size of the building. So there are lots of places to go.

Anthony W. Marx left Amherst College to head up the New York Public Library, and a former Colgate University president, George D. Langdon Jr., once ran the American Museum of Natural History. What can presidents of small liberal-arts colleges bring to major cultural institutions?

Anyone who has held positions of leadership in mission-driven institutions can transfer those skills to other places. So I’m not sure it has to be a liberal-arts college as opposed to a university. What higher-education leaders can bring, among other things, is a genuinely deep respect for shared governance. You really can’t be a successful college president — no matter how smart you are or how successful a fund raiser you are — you cannot sustain that if you don’t understand and appreciate shared governance. That’s fundamental.

There is on the one hand the exigency of decision making. We’re a business. We’ve got to make decisions about things on a regular basis. But I don’t think it’s as urgent as some people historically have thought. “How ’bout we have a meeting and talk to the curators to see what they think and make a better decision.” I brought a deep commitment to shared governance to this work that I probably wouldn’t have brought if I hadn’t spent 10 years as a college president working on governance every day.

Now that you’ve been here for a couple years, what have you learned that could have helped you as a college leader?

One fundamental component of higher education is the primacy of process in decision making — that almost as important as the outcome is the idea of process. If you’re going to do anything that involves the campus or the students, you need to to make sure they’re part of that discussion, even if you know that what they have to contribute isn’t likely to inform that much.

There’s probably some value in a little bit less process in higher education, especially since the decision cycles of running a college are shorter and shorter. There are all kinds of issues that college leaders must address, and they can be encumbered by a process that is overly deliberative, notwithstanding what I said earlier about collaboration.

Everything takes a long time, and sometimes you don’t have the luxury of that, and your organization will suffer or languish if the decision isn’t made in a more timely way. This place knows how to do that. We’ve got to open our doors every day.

You’ve said that when the Met was founded in 1870, “it had no art.” So philanthropy is in the DNA of this kind of cultural institution. Are the fund-raising demands on college leaders these days out of sync with their other roles?

I see it more clearly now that I’m not in that work. There has been, over the last generation, a diminishment of focus on those core aspects of leadership: thought leadership; developing big ideas; being, in some ways, a voice of our best instincts, our best ethical impulses. It’s more of a commercial enterprise than it used to be. You’ve got to balance the budget. You’ve got to raise the money. You’ve got to deal with all these constituencies. As the costs of higher education have risen, increasingly there’s this kind of consumerist mentality that has to be addressed: “I’m paying good money to send my kid to your college, the food has to be better.” I got calls like that as a president. And I’m pretty sure Clark Kerr did not get those calls in 1962. It’s a harder job today to be a college president than it was 20 years ago.

Less fun or less interesting?

It’s much less fun. Absolutely.

Some of the challenges the museum has identified for its future — the need to expand online, make better use of technology, and serve a more diverse audience — sound a lot like challenges many colleges face today.

A couple of themes pertain to both. One is what do you do about technology. Museums are dedicated fundamentally to connecting people to objects — the primacy of the thing itself. So what will virtual technologies do for us in a world where that’s the most important thing? I think we have figured that out, but it’s an ongoing question as technology gets better and better.

Is there a common peril for colleges and museums? That technology will come between the student and the professor in the same way that technology comes between the visitor and the object?

Exactly. One thing we think about a lot is who are our visitors? Seven million people walk through our doors every year. It’s crucial for us to serve them well and to have objects and exhibitions. We’re the second-most well-attended art museum in the world. But we have over 32 million visits to our website each year, of which many of those people will never come here. School kids in Pakistan whose only engagement with the art in this museum, or maybe any art, is through our website. And our website has become one of the most valuable and effective educational tools for learning about art anywhere in the world. We have to decide how committed we are to that mission, which has very little to do with the direct encounter with the work of art physically, but everything to do with inspiring people to learn about art and value what this institution represents. That’s a technology question. It’s a mission question. And it would have been a ludicrous question 15 years ago.

Does that tie in with the Met’s decision a few months ago to make those hundreds of thousands of digital images of its collection freely available?

Tom Campbell, my predecessor as director here, was very committed to that idea of open access, and he believed that it is core to an educational institution’s mission. When I was a beginning professor of art history at Johns Hopkins and I was working on my first book, I had no money. In order to publish that book I had to buy photographs and pay permissions at places like the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Oxford Bodleian Library — thousands of dollars for permissions for works of art produced by artists who had been dead for a millennium. That has changed [snaps fingers]. I can now download those images from the web right onto my printer and publish them. We wanted to be part of that movement.

Scholars can use them? Anybody can use them?

You want to create a pattern for selling shower curtains with our paintings by Edward Hopper? You can do that, and we’re not going to stop you. They’re open access: 375,000 images are available.

Getting back to this notion of serving a more diverse audience, the changing demographics of our country: Any parallels to the challenges facing higher education?

I think about that question a lot. It’s a wonderful thing that for the first time in the history of this country pretty much everybody who lives here feels that they have a right to everything this country has to offer. A Latina kid growing up in the South Bronx who is a really good student can set her sights on any college or university in the country, and believe she has a right to go there because she’s academically qualified to do so. And the institutions believe that too.

Are there things the museum needs to do make itself more democratic, in the same way colleges are making changes?

The initial barrier is just getting people in here the first time. This place is so vast that to build a relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, if you’re interested in art, is a lifelong relationship. So the first step is removing those barriers that are intimidating to people who might want to come but don’t.

The other is educationally, art — like classical music — can be very intimidating. “What do I look at? Why is Edward Hopper important anyway? I mean I could probably do that.” So how do we give them enough access to see, “Oh, that’s really interesting. I’d like to see more pictures by Hopper.” And so we have — wait for this — 30,000 educational programs a year in this building.

For college students we have probably the largest art-museum internship in the world. It’s competitive. What the public sees here is a small part of what this institution does. One of our core objectives is to produce new knowledge — like a university’s objective is — through our exhibitions, through our conservation work, through research and scholarship.

How do the Met’s more mundane matters, like deferred maintenance, compare with those at colleges? Met patrons want to donate for art, not fixing skylights, right?

For a couple reasons, it’s harder here. At a college the infrastructure tends to be distributed. So we have to renovate the chemistry building. OK, maybe we can rename the chemistry building, and when we do we’ll tear up the HVAC system and put in new. So they’ll make the building look pretty and create better laboratories, and we’ll also fix all those problems. And that’s one of 75 buildings on campus. At the Met, we’re basically three buildings, most of it is this 2.1-million-square-foot building. This building is larger than Haverford College’s whole campus is. It’s harder to raise money for infrastructure if you can’t tie it to a renovation project with naming rights.

The bigger challenge is, the standards that we have on the performance of our infrastructure is much higher. You can be a college student in a dormitory where the windows don’t close properly so you wear a sweater. But here we have to maintain perfect climate control in every gallery. We have to maintain perfect humidity control all the time. We regulate those things because our core mission is to preserve the objects in our collection — forever. We spend more money per square foot on maintenance of our facilities than colleges do.

What do you see as the role of a museum like the Met, or any major cultural institution, in Trump’s America?

Although it’s something of an axiom to say, “now more than ever,” what we represent is something that brings people around the world together. We are a monument to the best of human civilization throughout all of recorded history. What we have within our walls are highest achievements of art, of all civilizations. What we represent is a commitment to human achievement, to empathy, because the more you are exposed to other cultures, as Steven Pinker has written, it builds empathy. That’s why, actually, we live in a safer world today than we did in the past because people understand each other. So it does that. And simply the capacity for humans to learn — that’s what we represent. So in some ways our mission is more important today than certainly, in my lifetime, because those things are held in lower and lower regard.

And whatever Donald Trump and his administration think is important, we’re going to come here every day and open up the doors and welcome the public, and help transform them and create a more enlightened citizenry — both in this country and around the world. And ultimately that trumps Trump, because that endures. It touches what matters to people. That’s what we come to work to do every day.

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

Inside the Met: A Slide Show

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Daniel Weiss, a former college president who is now chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says that when he has a few minutes to kill, he heads down to the museum’s Greek and Roman galleries.

All photos by Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

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Scholars work in the museum’s Watson Library. Daniel Weiss, the Met’s chief executive, says the museum considers itself “a cultural university.”

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Visitors explore the light-filled Charles Engelhard Court in the museum’s American wing.

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Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bronze “Diana” is the centerpiece of the glass-enclosed Engelhard Court.

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Claude-Joseph Vernet’s “A Grand View of the Sea Shore” (right) and Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s “Aegina Visited by Jupiter” (left) draw visitors to the Met’s European wing.

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Sunny Gaughen, a Vassar College senior who interns at the museum, works with costume samples in the Costume Institute Conservation Laboratory.

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Lisa Barrow, an associate photograph conservator at the Met, restores a photographic piece for a collection. The museum has six conservation studios.

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Thomas Cole’s “The Oxbow” hangs on the far wall of the museum’s Jack and Susan Warner Gallery of the New American Wing. Cole is considered the founder of the Hudson River School of landscape art -- a favorite of the Met’s chief executive, Daniel Weiss, an art historian by training.

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Daniel Weiss, a former college president who is now chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, says that when he has a few minutes to kill, he heads down to the museum’s Greek and Roman galleries.

All photos by Mark Abramson for The Chronicle

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