Dollars and Scholars

There is nothing new under the sun at the Harvard Semitic Museum. When President Bok and 300 backers of the museum gathered at Divinity Avenue three Sundays ago to celebrate its long-awaited opening to the public, they were re-enacting, with almost uncanny precision, an event that had taken place 79 years before.

This was the Semitic Museum's second official opening. And if the squat brick building had its own voice, it might well ask why the University failed to honor the promise it made in 1903 to maintain the museum as a scholarly and public institution. The answers would be neither happy nor simple.

The story of the museum's trek back toward respectability is generally a more cheerful one, but it too is complicated--by a curiously anachronistic faith in the power of knowledge to smash prejudice and a desire to make bedfellows out of those two long-time strangers: the scholar and the general public.

These concerns did not trouble millionaire rail-road financier Jacob Henry Schiff in 1903, when he presented Harvard with its first Semitic collection and a building to put it in. Schiff, who hailed from one of Europe's most distinguished Jewish families, invested his money in a private war on anti-Semitism, firm in his conviction that "the gaining of a thorough knowledge of the civilization of those who have been before us means a better humanity and happier conditions for ourselves, and even more so for those who come after us." Harvard President Charles W. Eliot graciously accepted the gift and the spirit that accompanied it in the name of the University.

Supported by an already thriving Semitic Department, the infant museum got off to an impressive start during Eliot's last year in office. But Abbott Lawrence Lowell assumed the presidency after Eliot's retirement in 1909, and the department and museum soon began to decline. Established professors died or retired, and no replacements were hired. Funds for museum upkeep and expansion mysteriously dried up. From the '20s through the early '50s, the few remaining Semitic scholars at Harvard sturggled for academic survival while colleagues at Chicago, Pennsylvania and Yale Universities were making impressive headway, sponsoring archeological expeditions, scholarly publication and museum expansion. Recall that Indiana Jones, the hero from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" acquired his Ph.D. at Chicago.

Legal difficulties over Harvard's treatment of the Semitic museum first cropped up when Dean McGeorge Bundy proposed in 1958 that the building be sold. Concerned about Eliot's original pledge to Schiff, a Faculty committee strongly recommended instead that the upper floors be rented out for no more than five years to raise funds for the museum. The Center for International Affairs (CfIA) moved in, and workmen literally tossed the museum's mahogany display cases out the window.

The CfIA ended up staying for 21 years, relegating the museum to the building's basement. But in the meantime--despite a bomb blast anti-war demonstrators staged in 1970 to protest the presence of then-Professor Henry A. Kissinger '50 in the building--things were finally stirring in the department. Top scholars were brought back to Cambridge, partly as a result of pressure from the stubborn few who stayed through the lean years and partly to keep up in the academic rat race.

"Forty years of shadowy existence" was how President Bok described the period at the most recent dedication ceremonies at the museum. He added that he was "ashamed" that the University had waited until 1982 to reopen this plucky little institution.

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"Harvard is a pretty exasperating institution to work with," says Carney Gavin, the museum's current curator. "It's like dealing with the Catholic Church, or the U.S. Government." Gavin arrived here in the late 1960s as a doctoral candidate in Syrio-Palestinian archaeology and took an immediate interest in the large and dusty collection of artifacts he found locked away in the basement at 6 Divinity Ave. That jumble of clay figurines and broken pottery on plywood shelves was the Harvard Semitic Museum: nearly 10,000 objects tucked into 3467 square feet of space. Trying to locate anything in that congested basement was like setting out on an archaelogical dig.

Graduating into the position of de facto curator of the museum in 1973. Gavin promptly took it upon himself to lead the forgotten institution out of exile.

He then learned just how exasperating Harvard could be: "I tried to find the seat of power--formally, informally... I tried very hard." Gavin found nothing but what he saw as inertia and indifference. All the while, he was preparing a list of embarrassing questions to ask the administration: What part had Lowell's widely recognized personal prejudices played in the apparently systematic sabotage of Semitic studies at Harvard during the '20s and '30s? Why was the University no longer picking up the tab for heating and maintenance as Eliot had promised in 1903? How did Bundy almost get away with selling the building in 1958?

Gavin posed some of his most aggressive queries in the newsletters he began producing in the early '70s, nestled in innocuous cloud-balloons in the corners of his whimsical covers drawings: "Does Harvard's treatment of Mr. Schiff's gift warn would-be donors?" The great philanthropist had died bitter and disappointed in 1920 after seeing the University turn its back on his generosity.

The human side of his museum's roller-coaster history means a great deal to Carney Gavin. A bluff, bulky, gigantically affable man, he makes friends--and remembers their names--with instinctive ease. He saw that his cause carried little weight among the administrators: he had no money. So Gavin, a practicing Catholic priest, turned to his last resource: people. He marshalled a vast army of eager volunteers out of thin air, and by the mid-'70s, hundreds of area professionals and students were helping him put his museum back together again. He once even piled the entire Harvard football team into a truck and sent it off to Brandeis to retrieve a long-lost collection.

Gavin also made friends with his upstairs neighbors, the scholars of the Center for International Affairs. He invited them to get-togethers and dropped subtle reminders that the building did not really belong to them.

"We found out that we were where the power was," Gavin says now with a touch of bitterness and pride. He is not ready to grant the University--or anyone else but his own friends--even a crumb of credit for the slow rise of the Harvard Semitic Museum during the 1970s. Gavin himself has never received anything more than an annual $300 honorarium from the University. His own salary, and virtually every penny the museum has spent in the last 10 years has been raised by his own efforts.

Gavin estimates that he has generated more than $1.7 million in corporate and government grants and private gifts. He waged his biggest battle in 1980, when the administration presented him with a bill for $19,000 worth of heating and maintenance costs. With the CfIA was gone. Harvard argued, Gavin would have to pick up the tab.

The fighting priest called it highway robbery, pointing to President Eliot's promise way back in 1903 to maintain the building forever. He says that pulled every influential string he could get his hands on, and that the administration acquiesced.

Bok declines to comment on recent University-museum tension, saying. "That goes back to decisions made before I was in office." And University Financial Vice President Thomas O'Brien scoffs at suggestions that Harvard could be swayed by pressure tactics. "Gavin is an awfully tough man to turn down," concedes O'Brien, "but the decision [to once again pay for maintenance] was not based on pressure as much as on the weight of the evidence....After going over all the issues, we conceded the wisdom of his position."

Gavin's campaign has culminated in the current exhibit. "Danzig: 1939," an artistic and photographic record of the Jewish community in that city on the eve of World War Two, and the surfacing of the museum on the upper floors.

This, then, is how a dead museum comes back to life, says Carney Gavin, with sweat and passion and hard-earned pennies. It pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.

Frank Cross, the museum's director, has his own explanation for the Semitic Museum's startling comeback. As an elder statesman of the thriving Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Cross likes to think that the museum's fortunes are intrinsically tied to the success of the department. He tells a story about the Semitic Museum that is not very much like Gavin's at all.

How does a museum build upon a scholarly foundation? According to Cross, it is a gradual, almost organic process. A small department builds a scholarly reputation through hard work, both in publishing and in teaching. It attracts more graduate students, who eventually win teaching positions at other institutions, and more prestige falls to the department. Finally, the administration realizes what is happening and creates even more junior and senior faculty positions.

"Suddenly," Cross explains, "the department was big enough to fill the building." And so for all intents and purposes the museum was reborn: The department had ousted the CfIA from the upstairs office space by sheer strength of numbers. Agreeing for the most part with Cross's interpretation. O'Brien says, "The museum just expanded into its space."

Cross, of course, warmly acknowledges Gavin's part in all this. But he stresses repeatedly that hard, quiet work will always bear fruit, and although the administration has other concerns now, Harvard cannot turn its back on the department forever.

We are left with two independent interpretations of how a Harvard institution comes into being: Gavin and his volunteers scrounge for pennies. Cross and his graduate students publish articles. Are they working at cross-purposes? Is the new museum heading off in two directions at once?

The current Danzig exhibit is perhaps the first symptom of this institutional schizophrenia. Neither Harvard nor the Near Eastern Dept. brought "Danzig: 1939" to the Semitic Museum--the National Endowment for the Humanities. Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Dorot Foundation, and a host of other private and corporate donors did. They answered Carney Gavin's letters because it seemed to them that the Danzig exhibit was of significant historical and cultural interest to the general public.

The exhibit deserved a visit to Boston because there are people here who want to see it: it deserved to re-open the Harvard Semitic Museum cause it seemed so consistent with Schiff's original dream of "promoting sound knowledge of Semitic languages and history."

The Museum did squeeze in one scholarly event among all the public lectures and films and special exhibits, an academic symposium on the Danzig experience moderated by Professor Isadore Twersky. But the symposium could have taken place without the museum and even without the exhibit. Holocaust studies, strictly speaking, are not in the domain of the Harvard Near Eastern department; nor does 19th-or 20th-century Judaica make up any significant portion of the Semitic Museum's collection.

Yet if the scholars had been left to their own devices, they could never have come up with an exhibit like "Danzig: 1939," an exhibit that carries so much meaning and emotion for so many people and attracts financial support from so many different sources.

But what is in store for the museum after the Danzig collection moves on in June? Provided it can come up with some display cases, part of that vast collection in the basement will go on exhibit in the upper floors. The scholarly machinery will continue humming as it has for a generation now. As Cross points out, scholars don't need display cases; they have been getting along perfectly well with the collection in the basement all this time. Without an attraction like "Danzig" and the high-gear publicity that accompanied it, will the general public bother to stop in for a look?

Jacob Schiff invested his money in a public education campaign: He believed in his heart that knowledge was the best weapon against prejudice. Carney Gavin has been scrapping for the last 10 years with the same ideal in mind. His legion of volunteers take the idea of public education very seriously; they want to tell everyone about the beauty and mystery and profound importance of Semitic culture. And they believe in the fundamental unity of Semitic peoples. Ultimately, says Gavin, the "survival of the planet" depends on the work being done at the Harvard Semitic Museum.

The dream is an old one, a dream that smacks of the optimism of the Enlightenment. Faith in the power of truth and knowledge holds a special place in American public life as much as in modern Jewish history. There is something anachronistic and quaint about Gavin's vision: What other archaeologist has such ambitions?

The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, for example, says nothing about world peace in its catalogue. It is difficult to take such an ambition seriously: we have already seen the dreams of too many well-intentioned men end in frustration and bitterness--men like Jacob Schiff.

Still, it was this spirit that opened the doors of the Semitic Museum on April 5. And the people at the museum, to a man, will tell you that there is no contradiction--that a museum can be scholarly and popular at the same time. The administration seems to like what it sees, though O'Brien says that "when it comes down to dollars ... educational research [and not public exhibits] is the primary concern of the administration." Everyone at 6 Divinity Ave, hopes that one day Harvard will even offer its little museum a slot on a University fund drive. No one knows when that might happen, and University officials decline comment on the question. Until then, the two museums will get by on their own, side by side: graduate students burrowing in the basement collection; the volunteers printing T-shirts that say "Harvard" in five ancient Semitic languages.