Many of the University’s faculty pointedly asked “Given this breach of the trust of benefactors...who will ever consider giving a substantial art donation to our university in the future? How can such potential donors trust that the intention of their gift, stipulated at the time of their bequest, will be honored by future Valpo leaders?”
The plan has also come to the attention of professional groups dedicated to upholding proper museum practices. Because they watch out for just this sort of action, national groups like The Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Alliance of Museums, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, and the Association of Art Museum Curators said in a joint statement that they were “strongly opposed” to any plans to deaccession art to fund capital investments on campus. “College and university art museums have a long and rich history of collecting, curating, and educating in a financially and ethically responsible manner on par with the world’s most prestigious institutions,” the group said. “That a campus museum exists within the larger ecosystem of its parent educational institution does not exempt a university from acting ethically, nor permit them to ignore issues of public trust and use the museum’s collections as disposable financial assets.” That’s pretty clear.
The Association of Art Museum Directors also said that if the university’s administration went ahead with the sale, it would consider censuring and sanctioning the museum—something that it’s done to other college and university art museums in the past when they did the same thing.
My colleague Bob Elder here in the history department used to teach at Valpo and remembers the museum well. It’s a museum that punches far above its weight, he told me, reflecting on its holdings of American art. He used to take students from his Early Republic class to the museum to look at its impressive collection of paintings from the Hudson Valley school and talk about what they revealed about how people thought about the country.