NEMA 2014 Conference Panel: The Graduate School Conundrum

I've written here before about the panel I will be chairing at the New England Museum Association's annual conference this fall.

The survey that will lead off the panel is now open and seeking responses.

It can be found here, and I'd appreciate if you, gentle reader, could share this link as widely as possible. I'm hoping for a good cumulative mass of responses to start to get some good commonalities and statistical groupings. So far it's humming along nicely, and there's some fascinating (and depressing) information coming back.

Thank you for your help!

Weekly Blog Roundup

It's been a while. Massive work projects will do that to you. Here are some interesting reads I've found over the last few weeks.

Why Marketing Needs a Corporate Folklorist from the Harvard Business Review

On the one hand: I could not agree more that having a corporate historian is an absolutely necessary position to ensure continuity, culture, and plain old memory.

On the other hand, the argument here, which ultimately ends up as "history helps you sell stuff!" squicks me a little.

On the other other hand, isn't that what we often say to sponsors anyway?

The Nonprofit Director's Skill Set: One Group's Opinion from Leading by Design

I have a copy of Leadership Matters waiting for the right moment and amount of concentration to read it, but in the meantime I quite enjoy this blog. I also really enjoyed this blog post, which I thought was an interesting consideration of an actually really important topic. Hiring a leader is one of the most important things any nonprofit organization will ever do.

What My Favorite Meteorologist Has To Do With City Museums from CityStories

Rainey is a brilliant, original thinker and I really like the clear argument she makes here for the work a city museum should be doing to connect to its constituency. I like the way she's framed it as a balance between expertise and community integration, something so many museums struggle with.

Dear Ann Coulter

I know, I know: when I led workshops this spring about social media and online presence for history organizations, one of my rules of thumb was "don't feed the trolls." There are people who exist in this world who will say ridiculous, outrageous, vicious things simply to garner attention. The internet is their playground.

However, given that I have talked about family history on this blog, and tracked the movements of my ancestor Richard Gustin in particular, I do have to carefully and precisely refute her recent argument that "I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer."

(I will not link to her full blog post, because it is filled with racism, nativism, and a whole boatload of particularly obnoxious privilege; Google "Ann Coulter" and "soccer" and you should hit it immediately.)

My grandfather was born in Pennsylvania, and he fought in World War II. My great-grandfather was born in Pennsylvania. His father was born in Pennsylvania. His father was born in New Jersey, and he fought in the Civil War. His father was born in Massachusetts. His father was born in Massachusetts, and he fought in the Revolutionary War.

You get the picture? That's one line of my family; the other goes back even further. I have an atypical American family tree for the lack of immigrants that show up after the 17th century. So I should be Ann Coulter's ideal American, at least for that narrow definition and example.

I love soccer. I watched a ton of the World Cup games. More to the point, both of my brothers are those fans. They play several days a week in competitive leagues. One went to college on a Division 2 soccer scholarship. They tailgate at New England Revolution games. They live and die by the fortunes of the US Team. They react in the white-knuckled, nauseated, deathly still way to a close game the way only a diehard sports fan can manage. Their heritage is the same as mine.

Again: not that it needed refuting. But I am living proof that she is flat out wrong.