The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, planted dramatically at the north end of the Capitol, was built for people comfortable with the noisy bustle of a shopping mall, people who like their history served up supersized, consumers who pay top dollar expecting — and getting — spectacle in return. From its gigantic welcoming Lone Star to its vertigo-inducing IMAX theatre, it delivers history as theme park: a giant display case built to dazzle the crowds of out-of-town tourists.
The old Texas Memorial Museum, opened in 1939 and now tucked away behind the Performing Arts Center on the north end of the UT campus, was built for people with a taste for calmer, less-crowded pleasures. “It was built with a Victorian ideal of knowledge acquired through quiet,” said Museum Director Ed Theriot said. “But in recent months, TMM has become a much noisier place — caught in the middle of a fussy yet principled debate over where the old museum is headed and a yearlong renovation to help it get there (see “A Pterosaur’s Eye View,” p.26).
TMM is changing — Theriot is seeing to it — and there are some people who don’t like the change. They especially don’t like the way Theriot is handling it. One employee found the change so “ethically troubling” that she quit her job as manager of the museum’s cultural collections. “I was dumbfounded,” said Sally Baulch, when Theriot announced to the staff, in August 2002, that the museum would be getting rid of the cultural collections acquired since it opened in 1936 and shifting its focus exclusively to natural history.
More than dumbfounded, Baulch said, she questioned the ethics of the decision, because neither the museum’s staff nor the community were involved in it. “I’m a little doubtful about [Theriot] making the decision alone. That’s what made me uncomfortable,” said Baulch, who now works for Texas Parks and Wildlife. She said the UT board of regents, which also serves as the museum board, was not asked to vote on the decision, even though it involves dispersing or possibly “deaccessioning” (i.e., selling off) potentially valuable collections. “I think when we are talking about what happens to more than 40,000 objects,” Baulch said. “It needs to go to the regents.”
The Wonders of the World
The thousands of objects among the TMM cultural history holdings include items acquired from donations and field collections. They range from the mundane to the exotic, from lowbrow to high art, from practical to whimsical, from the historic to the merely old. There are kitschy objects made from animal horn, but there is also an impressive collection, of unknown worth, of pre-Columbian pottery; a collection of 1,300 firearms that includes not only a historic pair of beat-up pistols owned by Stephen F. Austin but also a German machine gun of no particular historic value; a teapot presented to Sam Houston in 1839 by the empress of China in honor of Texas independence; Moroccan rugs; more than 30 Navajo rugs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries; quilts, including Texas quilts that made up the museum’s final cultural exhibition; clothing and costumes from antique hats to a 1960s swimsuit; lamps that burn everything from fat to kerosene; various military objects; boot-making and shoe-repair tools; 340 timepieces of various sorts; 877 U.S. patent models; tools; ranching equipment including 840 branding irons, 230 pairs of spurs, 60 saddles, and 120 barbed-wire samples; various anthropological materials from the U.S. and Canada; Mexican folk art, textiles, and ceramics; 1,600 Mexican folk toys; and a variety of items from South America, Africa, and Oceania.
Baulch described the holdings as “really broad” with “worldwide” sources. She said that when Theriot made the decision to eliminate the cultural holdings, he said that “Texana materials would go to the university’s Center for American History. The other stuff was not mentioned” — another troubling aspect of the decision.
Brent Lyles is another former TMM employee. He lost his job as director of Public Programs before Theriot announced the changes at the museum, but he has been vocal about his discomfort with Theriot’s action. “I don’t think Ed is doing anything illegal, but I think he is doing something unethical, and I think he knows it.”
Theriot doesn’t back away from the fact that he made the decision to change TMM’s direction. And he doesn’t find it ethically troubling, either. “I get a little hot with this ethical argument,” Theriot said. “Unethical would be putting things where they will never be seen. We cannot be the museum of the stuff the staff loves any more than we can be the museum of the stuff Ed Theriot thinks is cool. We will fail.”
Theriot said his decision had the support of Mary Ann Rankin, dean of the College of Natural Sciences, which operates TMM. University Provost Sheldon Ekland-Olson submitted the proposed change to the university’s legal affairs office before signing off on it in August 2002. Theriot also defended the decision as being perfectly ethical within the museum community. True, TMM was first chartered as a natural history and cultural facility in 1935, but Theriot said it was made part of the university in 1959, with the stipulation that it be run “for the benefit of the University of Texas.” He contends that his decision to eliminate the cultural collections is the best way for the museum to serve the university, especially under the wing of the College of Natural Sciences.
Theriot sees no reason why his decision should have come as a surprise to anyone, and says it was no secret: “When I was hired there was a question during the [job] interview about changing the focus of the museum to natural history.” That was more than five years ago.
Out of the Attic
Ed Theriot seems like the man his credentials and his job make him out to be: an academic, a biologist, a museum enthusiast. But he is also a museum director who has had to take a long, businesslike look at the museum he runs — and the Bullock-influenced world he runs it in — and make some businesslike decisions.
“Thinking about it like a business — not a for-profit business, but not a for-loss business, either — if you try to be all things to all people all the time, you fail,” Theriot said. “People think of us as the dinosaur museum.” And he doesn’t think that is a bad thing. But he thinks there is another way to see TMM, too. “We are a 60-year-old start-up business.” And he doesn’t think that is such a good thing. To be successful, he says, “We have to leverage our core resources against what the public wants.
“Even with no Bullock, you could see what we needed to do,” Theriot said. It is “largely a coincidence my decision was made after the Bullock opened.”
“From early on we said we needed to find what would unify and drive the museum,” he said, adding that that turned out to be natural history. “What appealed to people was that we were the authority, making discoveries and doing research.”
During the past three or four years, Theriot said he has assembled an advisory council, drawing heavily on people involved with business and marketing. “They suggested change,” he said. And they suggested that the museum focus on its strength.
One problem is limited resources. TMM operates on an annual budget of about $1 million, and only $167,000 is provided directly by a state budget line item for public programming. Permanent university funds and specific grants provide the bulk of the budget, supplemented a bit by sales from the museum shop. Indirect costs, including such things as utilities, are paid out of general UT revenues and just about double the basic budget — so the actual cost of housing and preserving the collections comes to nearly $2 million. Theriot said that the museum has poured a sizeable portion of its resources into cultural history exhibits in recent years, at the expense of the bulk of the museum’s holdings. “While doing a very nice job with things like quilts and with rearranging Native American artifacts, at the end of the day we still were stuck with a 1960s geology hall,” he said. He believes that approach was doing the university and the museum a disservice.
Theriot said the strength of TMM’s core resources is clearly in the natural history collections, where between 5 and 6 million individual pieces make up 99.3% of the museum’s holdings. “That other 0.7% represents the cultural history holdings and approximately 50% of that is what we would call ‘Texana'” — items directly related to Texas history. In addition, Theriot said, the natural history collection, which has built up through years of university-generated research and study, “grew organically”; the cultural history collection “grew more randomly,” sometimes through study, often through donations. Thus, “the sum of it is more random than the natural history collection.”
Theriot cited the 1,300-piece firearms collection. “We had it inspected by a professional about three years ago. He said what we had was a nice assemblage, but not really a collection.” Theriot described other parts of the cultural history collection as “piecemeal” and “fragmented” accumulations and said, “We are not the university’s attic.”
However, the university’s Center for American History “sees itself as being the university’s attic,” Theriot said. So, when he made the decision to eliminate the cultural history function of the museum, it was the first place he contacted. He knew they would want the Texana material.
Getting and Spending
Don Carleton directs the Center for American History. “This is something that should have happened years ago,” he said. “It is a way of putting strength with strength. They [TMM] haven’t been able to work with the material. We will be able to work with it more. It goes to the heart of taking resources and managing them.” Carleton said his staff already has begun examining the materials, seeing just what is Texana and what is not. It is a process that will take as long as a year.
Theriot said the history center will not be allowed simply to “cherry pick” the Texana collection and skim the good stuff. “They know they have to take it all or nothing.” He said the time for dealing with the rest of the cultural history collections will be after decisions have been made about the Texana. But the fate of the remainder of the collections could be something entirely different: deaccession. That is what a museum does when it gets rid of holdings. And that is what seems to be on the minds of some of the people critical of Theriot.
“What I would like to see happen is for the university and the public to see what a treasure they have and hire a manager to show it off,” said former staffer Brent Lyles. But that is not a part of Theriot’s plans.
Lyles doesn’t think much of Theriot’s abilities as a museum director. “He is well-intentioned, but I don’t think he is an effective manager,” Lyles said. He also thinks Theriot has shirked ethical responsibility by not including more people in the decision to change the focus of TMM and get rid of the cultural history collections.
Bausch has similar criticisms. “Usually decision is staff-driven. This is one person making the decision,” she said. “The advisory council is not allowed to shape the direction of the museum.” Bausch described Theriot’s advisory council as nothing more than a “friends of the museum” group. She still sees the museum as hampered by a lack of planning. But she also admitted that if the staff instead of Theriot had made the decision on which way TMM should go — nature or culture — the decision probably would have been the same. “We would have made the decision a different way,” Bausch said. “And we would have made an easier transition.”
While the Texana materials will be changing homes, all of it will remain property of the university. But what about the other collections? The pre-Columbian pottery? The Navajo blankets? The Moroccan rugs? All those firearms, costumes, and hats, the Eskimo jacket, the African spears? Is there a chance that any of that material actually will be sold?
“Yes,” Theriot said. Attempts will be made to place some of the collections with other museums in the state. But could any of the museum’s cultural collections reach the open market? “In theory, yes,” Theriot said, though he added that it is far too early in the process to consider it. “But we would have to consider donors’ wishes, the educational value of certain items, what other museums are interested in buying and selling. And if we do sell anything, we can’t just pocket the money or use it to cover shortfalls or capital investments. We could use it to buy other collections or in something like a research endowment.”
But he said that until decisions are made on the Texana, no other decisions will be made as to what to do with other parts of the collection. He said that is why he could not tell staffers precisely what will happen to all of the collections when he announced last August that the museum would focus on natural history. He said he still does not know. “The Texana is easy.”
Thinking of Dinosaurs
The curtain officially came down on TMM’s involvement with cultural history on Dec. 31, 2002. The final show featured Texas quilts and Native American cultures in the museum’s fourth-floor gallery. Now that gallery and a large first-floor gallery are closed for renovation. A dinosaur skeleton hangs from the ceiling of the first-floor gallery, ghost-wrapped snugly in plastic as workers paint the walls. The galleries are not scheduled to reopen until next year, but by early January, only items pertaining to natural history were for sale in the museum gift shop.
The first-floor gallery will house a brand new Hall of Geology and will be home to dinosaurs, fossil animals, rocks, and minerals, along with a working paleontologist. The fourth floor will feature the latest in computer-assisted visualization technology.
Theriot said his advisory council told him “to make the museum more presentable,” and that is what is happening. Specimens will be “artfully displayed” in freshly renovated spaces. But the spirit of the old TMM will live on. “We are going for an old look, but without the stodginess,” Theriot said.
Lynn Denton is director of the Bullock State History Museum. She worked for TMM for more than a decade and served as manager of the cultural history collections. “They have some tough decisions to make” to remain vital, she said. “These are important collections, and I have no indication that they don’t see them as important collections.” Of the museum’s decision to rid itself of the cultural history collections, Denton said that “as long as this is handled thoughtfully, carefully and legally, I don’t see a problem. This is a path TMM has been shaping for a long time, but that hasn’t always been articulated clearly along the way.”
Some people see Ed Theriot as a no-way-but-my-way kind of guy, with a no-nonsense management style, but he is also undeniably a man with a vision and a mission for his little museum. Leaving others to debate ethics and committees, Theriot is striding toward the future across what he obviously sees as firm legal and ethical ground. He said he is working with his advisory council to “brand” the museum, in time for a full reopening in January of 2004. When Texans think of dinosaurs, fish, snakes, rocks, and fossils, Theriot wants them to think of the Texas Memorial Museum. In the increasingly competitive and sometimes flashy world of museums, he doesn’t want to be Brand X. 
This article appears in February 21 • 2003.