What Williams Reunion-Goers Think of Covid Lockdowns and Museum Turmoil

Directors and curators find that Millennial staffers lack critical-thinking skills, temperament, and perspective.

E very couple of months, I write about news in the art world. My Williams art-history reunion is hardly art-world news, but I saw many past and present museum directors and senior curators and learned a lot. It’s news to me. I never dwell on the past, ha, ha, but the topic of the Chinese-coronavirus mass hysteria, hypnosis, and hallucinations loomed, especially the reckless lockdowns that closed every museum, some for nearly two years. My reunion was the biggest confab of museum elites I’ve attended since I was a museum elite myself. I wanted to know what they thought.

I’ve written about the scandalous museum lockdowns many times. Purportedly pledged to public service and access, too many museums barred communities from their heritage as Covid terror, always irrational, evolved into lockdown lazy and, before long, lockdown love. Zooming workdays were just dandy for the high-salaried, direct-deposit museum class, shirt and tie from the waist up, bedroom slippers, tutus, leather ’n’ leg irons — whatever scratches the proverbial itch — from the waist down.

Lockdowns became lockouts and weeks became many months. Sometimes Fauci-Mini-Me’s kept museums closed. These were local rather than federal public-health mediocrities who, like Dr. Peacock, loved the attention but, alas, unlike the NIH crowd, aren’t in line for Big Pharma payola — oops, royalties.

Kudos to those directors, mostly in the South, who bucked Covid kookery and opened the instant they could. My three local museums — the Bennington Museum, the Clark, and Mass MoCA — opened with dispatch as well.

Many of my director acquaintances denied they’re lazy — of course, they would — and educated me on something I sensed, but only generally. I’ve known for a few years that Millennials, born in the ’80s and ’90s but mostly the younger ones, were, potentially, a management nightmare. Our legacy colleges and universities are producing noisy, neurotic, entitled, and intractable graduates. Not every graduate, but a critical mass. Many, and the icon is the notorious “Mattress Girl” at Columbia, parade as victims. There, Emma Sulkowicz — a name that meets the persona — hauled a mattress on her back everywhere she went to protest what she claimed was a first-date sexual assault. The assault never happened, and, no, there was no second date. Sulkowicz says it was all performance art, but it was a sick parade. I’ve never seen a majorette march with a mattress strapped to her back — hard to twirl a baton — so I knew we were in uncharted waters.

This ilk, alas, populate our museums as young staffers. They, my fellow Williams alums insist, led the charge for endless lockdowns and, for that matter, pushed museums to embrace the Black Lives Matter outrage movement. In describing this new museum cohort, the leadership crowd, far from a geezer class, used words such as “clueless,” “dogmatic,” “whiny,” and “intellectually fallow,” the last a good one that I said I’d swipe.

I was surprised to find myself the warm and fuzzy one in the crowd, as unlikely a place to find me as, say, the top of Mount Everest. I taught Andover students, all now in their late 20s to early 40s, and Millennials. I’m fond of them and wouldn’t use any of those terms to characterize them. That said, Andover has always been a special place, and I don’t know the climate now.

No one among the alums said “triggered” or “snowflake.” “Dumb” is more like it. These young people can’t think critically and don’t know history, they said. And they’ve been vaccinated up the ying-yang, so have never been sick. They don’t even know cavities! They don’t know that epidemics are part of human existence. They bought the Covid terror propaganda and wailed for more and longer lockdowns.

They aren’t easily silenced. Yes, we had problem people during my days running the partisan staff in the Connecticut legislature. Some were know-it-all snots. Yes, I faced rebellions. In those days, though, we had fold-out guillotines among other assets tending to quell unrest and quell it fast. Now this doesn’t work. In museums, young people do tons of the grunt work no one else wants to do. They’re essential. This work involves visitor services but also curatorial minutiae. Keeping them happy is the senior staff’s mission, and it’s Mission Impossible.

They’re trained from babyhood to make their beliefs known, well weighed or not. And, in a time of union fever, they have a vote equal to their supervisor’s. Last week, the new union at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts ratified its first contract. The staff unionized at the height of the twin hysterias surrounding Covid and the George Floyd riots. They’ll get raises, but union dues will gobble them up. Management will right-size the staff to meet the new financial model.

During Covid, I’m told that junior staff in museums throughout the country tried as hard as they could to keep the doors closed. Directors and curators are afraid of this cohort. If the staff rebels, they’re afraid their boards won’t support them. Senior staff are now vetting applicants, especially from the Ivy League and chichi schools such as Williams, hoping to ditch those who think that protest, not art, is part of their job description. Even freshly minted graduates who understand that art history isn’t community organizing have a problem. After four college years of maneuvering around the PC scolds, they’ve got PTSD.

Of course, we all love Williams students, who are smart and prize collegiality. The art department is first-rate and, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, based on connoisseurship. Critical race theory has crept into some classes, but Williams art majors tell me they don’t take it seriously.

In the absence of a Williams man or woman, best to hire an Aggie, Husker, or Hoosier. Go West, museum directors, to find fresh staff sans conceit, rage, bark, bite, and bad work habits. And their art history is the real thing. The University of Kansas, UT Dallas, and UC Santa Barbara have distinguished art-history departments. One of my best students from my days teaching at Williams is now a senior professor forming a new art-history department at the University of Arkansas. It’ll be a great department.

One director friend said he’s considering a “no politics” rule conveyed up front to new hires. I wondered if that would help, since so many twentysomethings tend to believe that everything’s existential, and an existential emergency to boot. He said he’d tell them the Book of Genesis treats the things that are existential. The front page of the New York Times does not. My hunch? They’ve never heard of the Book of Genesis.

On another Williams front, I learned a couple of weeks ago that the college is building a new art museum. The current museum, as redesigned by Charles Moore in the 1980s, isn’t even 40 years old. It’s a lovely building with beautiful galleries. A few years ago, a new building in a new location was thought to cost $75 million. Now, with galloping inflation, the college will probably need to spend $100 million. Williams is flush. Its donor base is packed with gazillionaires. The zeitgeist for places like Williams demands ceaseless fundraising.

Troglodyte that I am, I look at colleges, even the high-end ones, as charities. Not soup-kitchen charities but as nonprofits with a duty to live modestly and to spend to enrich hearts, minds, and souls. A fancy new museum building doesn’t fit this profile. If the current college museum building is too small, and I agree it is, that’s bad planning on the part of the college.

Faced with a cash crunch when developing the Williams College Museum of Art in the mid ’80s, college leaders lopped 20 feet from the back of the building. It was epically penny-wise, pound-loopy-doopy. A few years later, the college truncated its new studio-art building next door to save cash. The building was too small the day it opened. A culture of smart, long-term planning makes for buildings that accommodate expanding missions and growing collections.

I’m told the current museum building can’t be renovated to achieve the profession’s peak HVAC standards. Again, probably true, but its HVAC prowess needs to be only good enough to get loans. Lending museums look for an ideal climate but allow for big pluses and minuses. The big issue, though, is space. Putting aside the college’s planning failures, the current building is too small. There’s no parking. And, even though it’s on the main drag in town, it’s hard to find.

The college museum, profile-wise, fades into the mists when compared with the glamorous, Renoir-rich Clark and the muscular, bleeding-edge Mass MoCA. This, in itself, undercuts collection development, which occurs mostly through gifts of art from Williams alumni. A new building, prominently sited, will help the cause.

Aside from donors, is there a constituency for yet another splashy museum in this rural, isolated part of the world? During the summer, Berkshire County is a cultural tourism magnet, but Williamstown is at its far-northern reaches. Will a new college museum draw more, and new, people to this little postage stamp, or will it merely take from the regular crowd at the Clark and Mass MoCA? We don’t know. I don’t think Williams studied tourism potential.

Williams is chasing a campus-wide net-zero-emissions unicorn, propelling it via boutique windbag power toward an expensive new building. That means it’s not living modestly. It’s living faddishly and foolishly. Net zero is a sham. A minute in the life of a belching coal-fired power plant in Guangdong Province in China cancels whatever Williams does, if we believe, and I’m sure this is a Williams religion, that we minor mortals can control the weather, of all things. The president and board at Williams expect this to cost $50 million over the next few years. The climate’s a crisis, they say. Oh, and we’ll keep our investments in oil companies. Hysteria and hypocrisy rarely align so completely.

The architects designing the new Williams museum, SO-IL, are based in Brooklyn, N.Y. They have worked all over the world and have a good portfolio of art and school projects. There’s no point standing athwart, since the new museum is happening, so we need to hope for the best. Some of the firm’s work looks like an ice cube, so the building committee has a serious invigilation job. Williamstown is cold enough in the winter. No one needs reminding.

The Williams campus, though pretty, is mostly done in bland, workmanlike Collegiate Gothic and Georgian Revival styles. The Clark’s two new buildings, designed by Tadao Ando, offer much to dislike, even abhor, but from the outside they are high style and raise the bar for Williams architecture.

This is a case where I look at the key people involved in the project. Pamela Franks, the director of the college museum, is a strong, experienced leader. She was intimately involved in the expansion and renovation of Yale’s art gallery when she was the deputy director there. It’s the most successful museum building project I’ve seen, transformative in a good way and economically efficient. She has the best taste. She’s new to the Williams leadership, though an alumna, and not part of the old, podunk college regime that saw cost-cutting as its guiding light in past expansions. I’m cheap but believe in building well and building for the future. The building committee is capable and conscientious.

I love Williams and my Williams friends. I’ll leave the Village Beautiful, Williamstown’s name for itself, and venture for a moment to San Francisco, to a bright, shiny, and happy note, twinkling with promise. Murals depicting the life and times of George Washington won’t perish from the censor’s whitewash after all, thanks to the voters who recalled progressive members of San Francisco’s school board.

Two years ago yesterday, I wrote a piece excoriating the San Francisco board of education, controlled by Trots, for voting to destroy a massive, precious mural program decorating the hallways at George Washington High School. Painted in 1936 by Modernist muralist Victor Arnautoff, the art depicted the life of George Washington from childhood to fatherhood — of the country, through the Revolution and his presidency.

The school board, flush with self-righteous anger and drunk with power, took offense at Washington’s ownership of slaves and his time as a twentysomething lieutenant in the French and Indian War. In their ignorance, hate for America, and spite unyielding, the board voted to spend $1 million to destroy the murals. Alumni wanted the murals to stay. A handful of crackpots aside, the students wanted them to stay. The murals were painted when the high school was built. They’re part of the architecture.

Leading the charge were board chairwoman Gabriela López and board members Fauuga Moliga and Allison Collins. On February 15, San Francisco voters tossed all three in the dustbin of history that Trotsky reserved for us capitalists. Trotsky died by ice pick. López, Moliga, and Collins went via the ballot box in a show of democracy that would have made Washington smile, even if we don’t want to see those wooden teeth. Last week, a reconstituted board voted to keep the murals where they are, rebuking a moment of government-sanctioned vandalism.

Nothing succeeds like success. Let’s have a good go now at the brats disrupting our museums. Having vanquished three Leninistas by the Bay, commonsense people need to address the little Maoists disrupting our museums. The place to start is newly created diversity, equity, and inclusion departments. These are in-house grievance machines. Without anger, without grudges, they can’t exist. They promote mediocrity and double standards. They prey on naïve, narcissistic young people.