The Price of Closing a University Museum

When Reese Barrick started working at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History at Kansas’s Fort Hays State University in 2009, he thought he’d landed one of the more secure jobs in the museum field.

The museum, whose origins on campus date back to 1902, houses more than three million paleontology, zoology and geology specimens from the Great Plains and beyond. In addition to hosting exhibits and other public programming, its collections have informed hundreds of scientific research papers, dissertations and theses.

Now, it’s the latest university-affiliated museum facing closure.

“In August, the [university] made suggestions that we needed to figure out how to increase our earned income by a lot over the next five years,” Barrick, director of the museum, told Inside Higher Ed. “We were working on those plans when the timeline shifted. In September, they told us they’re closing the museum.”

The abrupt decision came after the Kansas Legislature cut the university’s recurring base budget allocation by $2.4 million, earlier this year. According to FHSU President Tisa Mason’s statement announcing plans to close the museum by December, it “hasn’t been financially stable for some time” and has $20 million in deferred maintenance costs. Closing it will save $850,000 and “is the largest single piece of our solution” to address the budget gap, she said.

“When you cut into your leanest, most efficient state university, you are not trimming excess. You are cutting into muscle,” Mason continued. “None of this was a crisis while the university’s base budget was stable. The cut is what turned a chronic gap into one we cannot close.”

Closures ‘Haunt’ Universities

Although swift community backlash has since prompted a fundraising campaign to delay Sternberg’s closure, it wouldn’t be the first university museum to fold under broader institutional financial pressure.

In 2024, the University of New Hampshire closed its art museum amid enrollment declines. Earlier this year, DePaul University announced that it has “made the difficult decision” to shut down its art museum as part of its plan to ensure “long-term financial sustainability.” And last month, the nearly 200-year-old Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University closed to the public for good, citing rising costs and waning visitor numbers post-pandemic.

But such decisions “can haunt universities for decades,” said Craig Hadley, executive director of the Dennos Museum at Northwestern Michigan College and president of the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries.

“The short-term gain might be that the university balances its budget, but long term, it does a lot of reputational damage,” he said. “Corporate sponsors and grantors are assessing a university’s health. If I’m a major private donor considering a gift to the university, I may give pause if I notice a program like the museum has been shuttered.”

Part of what makes many university museums so vulnerable to cuts and closures is their funding model. According to data from the AAMG, the typical academic museum receives about 60 percent of its operating budget from its academic institution, making some attractive targets for administrators looking to close budget gaps.

“As enrollment targets increasingly become the subject of intense administrative scrutiny, boards are looking at programs across the university where they could realize some immediate cost savings,” Hadley said. “Administrators assume that the museum isn’t necessarily impacting the bottom line as far as enrollment, when the reality is that the majority of our academic museums are touching all aspects of the university.”

At Fort Hays State, Sternberg provides resources for students and faculty across disciplines, employs student workers and is integral to some science programs. “A lot of students that come to the university for paleontology and biology come because there’s a museum,” Barrick said. “Without it, there will be some faculty and students that just won’t come here anymore.”

Sowing ‘Mistrust’

Closing a museum also raises questions about the future of its collections, which at Sternberg contain live plants and animals. “Moving collections [to other museums] is an expensive, three- to five-year process,” said Barrick. “If collections were lost or sold and taken out of the public trust, then it’s like those specimens and related research on them don’t even exist anymore.”

He’s also worried that closing Sternberg and reducing the capacity of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel will sow a general “mistrust” in universities and university museums among potential donors to collections, who have an expectation that a museum will preserve their specimens in perpetuity.

“It’s going to be an issue even for university museums that are not closing. Donors may say, ‘Are you really going to stay open? Because look over at Drexel, look over at Sternberg. How are you going to prove to us that this is not going to happen to you?’” Barrick said. “That will cause issues for researchers because there will be a decrease in access to important specimens and future important specimens that may not get into the public trust.”

But the stakes of preserving and growing natural history collections have never been higher, says Elizabeth Ellwood, president-elect of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections.

“At a time when biodiversity loss, emergence of novel pathogens and environmental change make these resources more important than ever, we cannot afford to diminish the infrastructure and expertise required to sustain them,” she said. “Preserving natural history collections is not simply about protecting the past. It is about safeguarding the evidence, knowledge and scientific opportunities that future generations will depend upon.”