6A = THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25,2002
Anton Bubnovskiy/Kansan
ABOVE: The basement of Spooner Hall will house countless boxes of artifacts that will no longer be on display. This is just one row of many more.
RIGHT: This chair, dating back to 1900, is from the Chokwe Tribe in Angola, Africa. It was the chief's throne. The tribe considered it to be a mediation tool between the gods and themselves.
Museum
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Research, Inc. The review also placed the museum in high need of subsidies to help it continue its current operations. By cutting the public programming from the museum,$132,000 will be saved each year.
In June, the University elected to cut the public programming and some of its payroll money out of the museum's budget, which will leave a $106,000 budget for the museum. This cut came as a result of the University budget cut, and a need to make strategic cuts to save other University research institutions.
During the 2000-2001 school year, the Center for Research, which oversees the museum's money, conducted a review of the museum. It recommended that the University invest more funds in the museum to refocus the museum's objectives to make it more productive.
"In no way do we want to indicate that this was a snap decision, that this was easy," said Lynn Bretz, director of University
"In the best of all worlds, we would have loved to keep the museum as it was and beefed things up so it could do an even better job. But that's not the fiscal reality we face and we've had to make some difficult decisions."
Lynn Bretz Director of University Relations
Relations. "In the best of all worlds, we would have loved to keep the museum as it was and beefed things up so it could do an even better job. But that's not the fiscal reality we face and we've had to make some difficult decisions."
Mary Adair, interim director of the museum, said the report unfairly criticized the museum. She said it was not fully funded. Since taking over as interim director almost two years ago,
Adair said she had managed with a six-person staff, two of which were full-time. The museum had operated on a budget of $238,000. It managed to produce six exhibits each year and get enough grant money to cover the salaries of all of the employees. Adair said. The department periodically takes some of these exhibits across Kansas and has taught hundreds of children about cultural diversity.
"How do you say that's not productive?" Adair asked.
Three years ago the University invested $330,000 to restore Spooner Hall's stone exterior. Built in 1894. Spooner is the oldest building on campus and was the University's first library.
Over the last two fiscal years, KU has been hit with a $9.4 million shortfall, 4 percent of its operating budget. To cope with the cuts, Chancellor Robert Memenway has emphasized that "cuts will not be across the board." Rather, the University will implement strategic cuts throughout. The chancellor said this will help preserve and strengthen what the University does best, and allow the weaker programs to refocus their missions.
Six people will have lost their jobs at the museum by the end of June 2003. The staff will be reduced to one full-time faculty member, Adair, and one parttime faculty member, Jeannette Blackmar, associate curator for the museum. They will work to restructure and care for a museum that houses more than one million artifacts, which range from clay pots, thousands of years old, to recently discovered arrowhead shards.
The collection does not have an appraised dollar amount. Blackmar said this was because the museum studies field deter-
see MUSEUM on page 7A