Researchers are key to Bishop Museum’s future

Several days ago, Bishop Museum’s president, Blair Collis, announced major shake-ups at the museum, including turning full-time scientific staff into casual hires responsible for finding their own research money (“Bishop’s next move,” Star-Advertiser, Jan. 9).

Faced with the loss of federal earmarks and lingering effects of the 2009 financial crisis, the museum cannot afford to pick up the tab for research, it was reported.

Collis called this new model of researchers paying their own way a growing trend in science.

The problem with Bishop Museum’s new “business model” is precisely that the museum is not a business.

Since its founding in 1889, the museum’s mission has been to seek new knowledge about the island cultures and natural history of Hawaii and the Pacific.

Bishop Museum has a distinguished history of research, epitomized in its hundreds of scholarly publications, as well as in its public exhibits. So much of what we have learned about Hawaiian and Pacific archaeology and history, about island biodiversity, and the evolution of island life, has come from the painstaking work of Bishop Museum researchers.

Moreover, most of the museum’s renowned collections were acquired through the tireless fieldwork and expeditions of its former researchers.

Without the cumulative work of its research staff, Bishop Museum would not be what it is today.

Unfortunately, research at Bishop Museum has been on a steady decline over the past three decades.

In the early 1980s, I was one of almost 30 Ph.D. researchers on the museum’s staff. Today, the research staff numbers fewer than 10. If Collis’ new plan goes through, I predict that soon there will be no researchers left.

Why does this matter? Because a museum that ceases to pursue the frontiers of knowledge, that just cares for its existing collections but doesn’t add to them or study them in new ways, will soon become a static, fossilized, dead museum. And the repercussions will ripple through all of the museum’s other departments. Its exhibits will no longer be informed by the latest findings; its education programs will become stale, regurgitating outdated ideas and concepts. It will slowly but surely become little more than a “museum of a museum” that once was.

To be sure, Bishop Museum needs to get its financial house in order. But turning its researchers into unpaid contractors won’t solve the problem. In fact, the museum’s researchers have historically brought significant research dollars into the museum, funding most of the costs of their investigations.

Most research grants include substantial indirect costs or “overhead” that helps to pay for everything from accounting and security to the electricity bill. So letting the researchers go won’t solve the museum’s fiscal crisis — but will do irreparable harm to the museum’s ability to fulfill its mission.

And Collis is wrong to say that his plan is the new trend in museums. He should look to San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences, which recently announced that it will expand its research staff with a cluster hire of six new scientists, because the academy’s leadership understands that research is one of the fundamental — in fact essential — functions of a museum.

Collis and his board of trustees face daunting challenges, and I wish them well in their efforts to solve Bishop Museum’s financial crisis. But they need to recognize that the museum is not a “business” in which the bottom line is measured only in dollars and cents.

At Bishop Museum, the bottom line is the acquisition, perpetuation and dissemination of knowledge about Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. And without a research staff, that bottom line will always be in the red.