Kenneth Glad
Cities often hide treasures behind heavy stone walls. Locals grow up walking familiar halls. Then, without warning, the locks turn and the lights go dark.
The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia shut its doors in September. Drexel University took control in 2011. Now, officials blame rising operational costs for the closure.
Local politicians want immediate answers. City council members issued a subpoena forcing the university president to testify on 16 November, according to The Art Newspaper.
Lawmakers worry about the fate of roughly 19 million stored items. That scientific vault holds plants gathered by Lewis and Clark, along with fossils once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
Workers left behind
Employees received the bad news early on the first day of September. According to The Art Newspaper, many loyal workers only discovered their sudden layoffs by reading The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Massive cuts gutted the scientific team. Where eleven experts used to oversee the archives, barely five remain employed today. This skeleton crew now faces a flood of panicked messages.
Amber Redfield lost her job as a collection manager and now volunteers. She told The Art Newspaper that callers repeatedly demand to know the exact same things. “Is this safe?” they ask. “Can I see it?”
Looking for answers
During a recent hearing, Drexel representatives claimed the building requires major repairs. They told the city council that future public displays would happen “almost certainly in a different location.”
Organizers fighting to save the institution question those claims. Sarah McAnulty, a squid biologist, voiced her frustration to The Art Newspaper. “If all you need to keep the public museum open is a million dollars, what the hell are we doing here?”
A potential lifeline exists. The William Penn Foundation offered a full year of funding. A spokesperson told The Philadelphia Inquirer that the university never responded. Drexel pushed back, stating they never received a “formal proposal with a defined level of financial support.”
Locked doors remain
Silence from management continues to frustrate researchers. The museum’s social media channels have sat dormant for two months.
Isa Betancourt organizes with the Save the Academy coalition. She told The Art Newspaper that eliminating education staff leaves the remaining scientists working “in darkness.”
Betancourt offered a bleak summary of the crisis. “The closed-door negotiations got us a closed museum,” she said. “Natural history collections tied to a financially haemorrhaging university are not safe natural history collections.”
