Inclusion, Diversity, Equity: Museums Go All-In

But, practically speaking, what do these trendy words really mean?

T wo weeks ago I introduced a new museum concept called IDEA, an acronym for inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility. It’s the remedy for staff disgruntlement about pay, promotions, mentoring, insensitivity, and racial balance. It’s part of the multibillion-dollar grievance-and-grudge industry, an industry that produces nothing but big money for its promoters.

Some of the IDEA movement’s measures are good, some are bad. On some fronts, it’s lots of noise from blowhard, pandering directors and trustees. On others, reforms are overdue. There was a nationwide museum-staff revolt last year, something I’ve never seen, and museum leaders are addressing the angst.

In my story a couple of weeks ago, I detected a tsunami of tears from directors and trustees on the issue of accessibility, the “A” in IDEA. As part of that period of confession and covenantal IDEA demands, they promise that their unwelcoming institutions will be unwelcoming no more.

This is so fake. It’s an insult to baloney, salami, and mortadella. I don’t expect an embossed invitation to visit a museum or a red carpet or a punkawallah on hot days. “Accessibility” starts with an unbolted, open door. It’s advanced by free admission, an intelligent arrangement of art, and good shows. Guards and visitor-service staff help create a welcoming atmosphere. Museum directors are, on a macro level, the public face of the museum. Part of their job is selling the place to new audiences. That takes work. I wonder how many will be willing to do it. Most directors don’t see themselves as civic leaders.

So accessibility isn’t rocket science. Obviously, pledges to revamp museums into community centers ring hollow and tinny when made by directors, senior staff, and trustees who kept their places shut as long as they possibly could during the COVID hysteria. They’ve trashed years of audience-building in exchange for months of lockdown leisure, Zooming their days away, or at least that slender portion of their days when they’re not gardening, trying new recipes, watching porn, or reading the hottest graphic novel.

So we now know “accessibility” is a sham talking point, but what about inclusion, diversity, and equity? The “accessibility” component of IDEA, by the way, is the only one that has anything to do with the public. The rest of the IDEA revolution is insider baseball. It’s about the staff.

What does “inclusion” mean? It’s an approach embraced by all staff, including the director and the trustees, and it means collaboration, or power-sharing, in decision-making. It means encouraging, hearing, valuing, and considering the opinions, perspectives, and experiences of everyone on the museum staff.

There’s smart inclusion, and then there’s dumb, useless, time-sucking inclusion, which is mostly kabuki theater. Then there’s utopian inclusion, which means putting every big decision up for a vote. That’s not going to happen, simply because it would paralyze the institution.

Here’s smart inclusion. When I was a young curator at the Clark, the museum had a long, often excruciating period of team-building, led by consultants. This wasn’t unnecessary. Museums have more silos than an Iowa farm, and at the Clark, set in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts, the small-town staff embraced the Yankee do-it-yourself ethic, which meant do-it-alone, the less said the better, “collaboration” is a dirty word, and don’t tread on me.

In one daylong team-building session, we broke into groups and considered a hypothetical. Our group was at a conference in Colorado, out in the boonies.

A ferocious wildfire was heading our way. Our team had limited tools and instructions. What to do?

Well, our team dithered and debated before taking the guidance of John Onians, the Clark’s head of research. A memorable person, still with us, British, a professor of Italian architectural theory, a senior scholar, witty, erudite, idiosyncratic, and highly credentialed, John, we assumed, knew best. He talked over and under everyone.

Our team was not only practically burned to death, but Onians’s plan was so wrong and so convoluted that we managed to trigger a dam burst, too, our charred, drowned remains about to spiral to eternity in a cyclone of our own incompetent, deferential making.

We ignored a secretary on our team who lived where I’d call “up a holler,” a barely inhabited dot in the hills heavy on mobile homes and people whose heads were shaped like canoes, people who all had the same last name. She knew exactly what to do in a prairie inferno. I’m sure she could churn butter, shoe a horse, and butcher a deer as well. Listening to her would have saved our skins.

That’s good inclusion, and it’s canny, commonsense leadership. Real leaders and worthy colleagues look for the strengths among team members. They are not snobs and look for value everywhere.

I got a form email from the Art Institute of Chicago’s very good director, James Rondeau, reporting on the museum’s inclusion initiative. He says that the past year marked “an enormous focus on internal culture,” leading, among other things, to a “crucial new division of People and Culture, including the department of Inclusion and Belonging, a new team that is integral to both advancing our equity efforts and fostering a supportive anti-racist culture.” In the works are a new evaluation system, affinity groups based on race, and an inclusive language guide. There’s a staff working group called “narratives and content.” New staff-development programs will be racially targeted.

Much of the impetus behind inclusion — and, indeed, “diversity” and “equity” — is flagrantly ideological. The anti-racism movement proposes that racism is at the bottom of everything and explains everything. This, of course, is ahistorical and spurious, but its very reductiveness appeals to simple minds and sloganeers. I wonder how many of the directors who slapped words such as “systemic racism” and “anti-racist” on their museum homepages understand this.

It seems that the Art Institute is creating a separate HR function for what’s called BIPOC staff — black, indigenous, and people of color. Evaluations and expectations will differ, based on race.

These are terrible ideas. Over time, they’ll generate a culture of tokenism, looking the other way when it comes to poor performers, and a false, misleading sense among young employees of what a workplace is and isn’t. It’s a place for professional achievement. It’s a means to earn income. It’s not a family. Supervisors aren’t therapists.

A “narratives and content” committee, in practice, will try to dictate interpretation to curators. Things such as labels, what art goes on the wall, and what exhibitions the museum does are the curators’ to develop, with the director’s supervision and guidance. When I was a curator, I didn’t meddle in what the gift shop sold, which books the library acquired, what the café menu listed, or what the guards wore. I had no expertise on the subjects.

Since there’s now an Inclusion and Belonging department and staff, they’ll expect to be busy. “Inclusion,” as the staff sees it, means collaboration and power-sharing, so this new department will gather as much power as it can. White-privilege struggle sessions will surely occur, with high-priced consultants joining non-art bureaucrats in asking intrusive questions and demanding compliance with anti-racist dogma, which, again, posits that racism explains everything.

Will this lead to compelled diversity statements from candidates for jobs? Yes, if colleges and universities are any guide. Most require candidates to say how they contribute to the diversity cause and what their IDEA street cred is. Will this mean quotas for hiring and promotion? Yes. Targets are the same thing as quotas. Curatorial, fundraising, and PR departments will be forced to hire people they really don’t want or who really aren’t the best qualified. Will every exhibition need anti-racism messaging? Yes. That’s already happening, driven mostly by young curators. Over time, since this type of messaging is a bottomless pit, every object, artist, and theme will get the anti-racism once-over. Scholarship will suffer, since crying “white supremacy” and “white privilege” isn’t art history. Every show and every gallery will be a stage for battles between oppressors and victims. How boring.

The new Inclusion and Belonging department will inevitably cater to passive-aggressive types who try to win by pretending to lose. “I don’t feel like I belong” and “you don’t listen to me” and “I wasn’t included” can be justifiable points. But just as often, if not more, they’re the stuff of anxious, self-pitying, needy dullards — who are in the driver’s seat now.

I read about a dozen strategic plans from museums this week. The very good University of Michigan Art Museum, which is basically the museum for all of Ann Arbor, defines “equity” as “equal opportunity.” This is what “equity” meant to most people until last year. It meant equal pay for women. It meant, before gay marriage, making same-sex partnership benefits the same as spousal benefits.

But in the Black Lives Matter coin of the realm, now used by corporations and not-for-profits, “equity” means equal results. Again, as with inclusion, there’s good equity, or the useless or chimeric sort.

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a clumsy definition of “equity.” It’s “the outcome of policies and actions that creates a more inclusive and diverse institution that reflects its community.” This makes no sense, but it embraces the concept of equal results. The Phillips Collection, an IDEA pioneer, calls equity “fair and just treatment.”

Again, it’s easy to make the pursuit of equity a doomed surf on quicksand. The best, cleanest way to achieve good equity is equal pay for equal work. I wasn’t astonished to read last year that museum pay for women was wildly out of whack with pay for men. “After all these years,” I thought, “how shameful.”

I corrected imbalances of this kind when I was a museum director. It’s simple.

The Alliance of American Museums as well as the Association of Art Museum Directors publish detailed salary surveys for all types of museum jobs, organized by region. I followed the survey and made adjustments.

In its new strategic plan, the Getty is specific on its equity guideposts. I don’t think that every job search needs to have a person of color among the candidates, which is the aim of both the Getty and Cleveland. Interviewing candidates simply because of race would be a waste of time. The Getty is addressing a long-term chasm in pay between junior and senior curators. It’s refining its job classifications and descriptions, which I’m sure were inchoate, and it pledges to be a pay leader in Southern California. It should be. It’s loaded.

Unequal outcomes are bound to happen when we’re comparing the work of people. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Are these government by racism? That’s what “anti-racism” means in practice. That’s what BLM, Ibram X. Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo mean. It means endless propping up of poor performers. Still, if “equity” means fundamental fairness and equal pay for equal work, then I’m for it.

Diversity is “the makeup of a group to insure multiple perspectives are represented,” the Phillips tells us. I think this is great, but don’t believe that “multiple perspectives” and racial balance are the same thing. I don’t believe in gender-based or race-based hiring. I’ve hired hundreds of people over the years, picking the people I thought were best able to do the job. I was also biased toward people who weren’t like me or, precisely, who had strengths I didn’t. I found at the Clark and the Addison, and this is probably true in most places, that search committees look for collegiality and for people just like themselves. That’s the opposite of diversity.

The Huntington calls diversity “the quality of being different or unique at the individual or group level,” and that embraces “age, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, language differences . . . race, religion, sexual orientation, skin color, sociological-economic status, work and behavioral style . . . and more.” That’s rhetorical, since the Huntington means race, though, and maybe transgender identity, given that their plan repeats its commitment to unisex bathrooms.

Whether by design or fiat, the nice illustrations in the Huntington report almost entirely depict white people. Even a mariachi band looks all-white, though the trumpeter has an Afro. Still, the Huntington’s new strategic plan, and the Getty’s IDEA plan, are, overall, very good.

It’s safe to say that places like the Getty and the Huntington, both very WASPy and serving the social and academic crème de la crème, could take a good look at paying people fairly and searching beyond San Marino and Brentwood types in hiring. These are conservative museums with lots of pockets of exploitation.

I don’t think the National Gallery in Washington has a new strategic plan, but it seems to be doing a good job busting its basic problem, which is its Boys’ Club atmosphere. It’s got a new director, Kaywin Feldman, who replaced Rusty Powell, who’d been director for 25 years. The National Gallery had a lot of men who’d been in top jobs for many years. I can’t say they were biased because I never worked there, but I suspect things were done as they always were. That’s not good.

A new broom sweeps clean. Feldman has hired some great people. They’re younger than their predecessors, which is probably the best way to solve simmering but ignored grievances. They aren’t in-house hires. Rather, most of the new top people come from smaller places with broad-based collections, and their experience isn’t only in museums. The museum is buying great art, with a new attention to African-American and Native American art but also paintings by Dosso Dossi and Girodet. Its exhibitions program is very strong.

The museum bungled the Philip Guston show, rescheduling it to contextualize his Ku Klux Klan imagery. Everyone knows that was a blunder. Show the art as planned, put a label on the wall explaining the Klan pictures, and leave it to the public to figure them out. The biggest flub was doing yet another big Guston exhibition.

He’s so overdone, overrated, and overexposed.

On diversifying collections, I’d say go for it, as much as I hate the word “diversity,” since it’s a code for race-based decision-making. Again, this isn’t rocket science. Directors and curators should have been buying quality work by women, Latinos, and African Americans years ago. Ignoring them is plain snobbery.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art, a great museum in Minneapolis, bragged last week that it got a $5 million gift to endow a new chief inclusion-and-diversity officer. That’ll support a $250,000 annual pay package, a tidy sum for a Midwest city, much of which was gutted by Black Lives Matter riots. This, alas, is a big waste of money. It’s the director’s job to ensure that people are paid fairly and that hiring standards are clear. The director hires the senior staff, which tends to be the place IDEA proponents find, anyway.

Since this job is endowed, it’ll never go away. The chief inclusion-and-diversity officer will guarantee that the museum is never diverse or inclusive enough. New microaggressions will be found as pigs find truffles, and new identities sliced, diced, and hired to chase the diversity rainbow.

The director, and directors who’ve created similar positions, are merely off-loading fair pay, hiring, and promotions to someone else. With a deficit of nearly $2 million and layoffs, both caused by the COVID hysteria, the museum is creating another fat-cat, non-art job babysitting the staff rather than doing something that will enhance scholarship and the public’s enjoyment of art.

It’s a waste of philanthropy, too. To that obviously rich donor in Minneapolis, isn’t there a church, animal shelter, homeless shelter, or food bank that can make better use of $5 million?

Next week I’ll write about the push among museum staffs all over the country to unionize.