NEWS .

Weird Science

Inside the strange path that landed Bill Brown at the Academy of Natural Sciences.


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Published: Apr 11, 2007

institutions

HULA HOOPS: When he ran the esteemed Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Brown faced a raging controversy that saw natives pushing for artifacts to be returned to them.

Photo By: Christopher Pala

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

When William Yancey Brown arrived in Hawaii to take over Honolulu's Bishop Museum, which houses the world's biggest collection of Pacific artifacts, the institution was in the red, its staff demoralized and its reputation in tatters.

Five years and four months later, when he left to take over the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia on Feb. 1, the Bishop's endowment had doubled to $60 million, the budget enjoys yearly multimillion-dollar surpluses, and a $17 million science building whose construction and fundraising he supervised has raised yearly attendance from 300,000 to 450,000.

The oldest buildings, which date from the late 19th century, are undergoing their first major refurbishing. Brown also fought hard to get back some works of native art worth millions of dollars that a Hawaiian group had taken from the museum 18 months before his arrival and sealed in a cave, claiming they were funerary objects, over the loud protests of much of the rest of the native Hawaiian community. (Read an extensive sidebar about that interesting saga here).

After two months on the job here, Brown's experience has left him with a goal: to double the Academy's endowment (just as he did in Honolulu) to $120 million by 2012, when it celebrates its 200th birthday.

"Now I know how to do that a lot better than when I first parachuted into Bishop," he said. "I'm optimistic I can do it."

Brown, 58, is slight, affable and soft-spoken, and may be the only museum director who apologizes for rambling when he is interrupted. "He's the mouse that not only roars, but bites," says Jim Wright, a Honolulu lawyer.

Brown's resumé didn't obviously point to a museum directorship. Raised in Washington, D.C., he got a B.A. in biology from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in teaching from Johns Hopkins and a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Hawaii. He went on to Harvard Law School before heading the minuscule U.S. partner agency of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, where, he recalled, he managed to ban all U.S. bobcat pelt exports and heavily regulate otter fur exports, to the delight of environmentalists and consternation of the fur industry. (The agency was abolished after Ronald Reagan's election.) After a stint at Waste Management Inc., he served four years as science advisor to President Bill Clinton's interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt. But in early 2001, while working at the National Audubon Society, he happened to meet Donald Duckworth, an entomologist who had recently retired as head of the Bishop Museum after 16 years.

Founded in 1889, the Bishop attracted, among many artifacts, perhaps the biggest collection of ceremonial feather clothing in the world. It also became a natural history museum, with the country's fourth-largest collection of specimens — 24 million objects including 14 million insects and six million shells.

When Brown got to the Bishop, he spent the first year and half dealing with its $1 million-a-year deficits — "I had to fire 10 people just to survive, and after that I did a lot of fundraising" — and rescuing its biggest project, a plan sponsored by then-Gov. Ben Cayetano to build a science center on the city's waterfront, instead of on the museum's 17 acres of verdant, hilly grounds.

When he found out the site was an ash landfill full of contaminants "that would have cost millions and millions to cap," Brown persuaded his board to nix the plan and scheduled a meeting with the governor. "I took some members who knew him well with me, and they made me tell him," he said.

Then Brown cut down the science center, once part of a grandiose but unfunded $40 million project, to a manageable $17 million. He raised the final $8 million and supervised its construction. He also raised $14 million for the first refurbishing of the two magnificent original buildings of dark-red volcanic rock housing the Hawaiian and Pacific collections, adding air conditioning for the first time.

Brown's predecessor in Philadelphia was someone he had known quite well. During the second Clinton administration, D. James Baker had been the administrator of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Babbitt and Brown were pushing for the huge-but-uninhabited northwest Hawaiian Islands to become a no-fishing zone, while NOAA, part of which works closely with the fishing industry, favored keeping it a fishing zone.

In this battle, Baker's side got its way — until last June, when President George W. Bush designated the islands a U.S. National Monument where fishing is due to end in four years.

"Baker was always very friendly to me, and he was never in the room when nasty discussions occurred," Brown recalled. "And that's what happened here. He hired a deputy. I like to have five or six people report to me, instead of one deputy, and that's the way it is now."

Today, he says that he was glad the Academy was in "much better shape than the Bishop Museum was when he arrived."

Photo By: Christopher Pala

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

One part of the endowment he's focusing on is for the bird collection. "We have one of the best bird collections in the world, almost 1.5 million specimens including 3,000 that were used to first describe the species, and many extinct species, such as ivory-billed woodpeckers," he said.

So, he wants to raise $2 million to endow a curator of birds.

Brown also noted that the Academy has no annual fundraising gala dinner. Make that, it didn't used to have an annual dinner. "The first one will be for Ruth Patrick, who turns 100 on Nov. 26," he said. Considered by some the den mother of ecology, Patrick founded the Academy's Patrick Center, which monitors the effects of pollution on wild animals and plants.

In his short tenure, Brown has also intervened in a situation with similarities to his last job. When he arrived, the museum had decided to raise money to staff the library (which has no public hours and is by appointment only) by selling to a man in Colorado a 7,000-piece collection of gems amassed during the 19th century by William Vaux.

He was a former staffer who left it to the Academy on condition it remain there. To get a waiver, the Academy required the approval of the Orphans Court — "This is straight out of a Dickens' novel," Brown quipped — and a hearing had been scheduled when he took up his job. But when Brown heard of the plan, it didn't fit with his beliefs.

"I favor keeping the collections where they are," he said. "I accept we have a contractual obligation to support the sale, but only on economic grounds."

At the hearing, museum staff had planned to argue that the reason it wanted to sell the collection was because it could no longer care for it. "But to say you can't take care of something is really a bad thing for a museum to say," Brown said with a laugh, "so that really caught my attention." He conveyed to the court that the museum could and would be quite happy to keep on caring for the gem collection.

"Now it's extremely unlikely that the sale will be approved," he said. The Academy is preparing an appeal to donors to endow the library — the oldest biological library in the western hemisphere — so that the Vaux collection can remain in Philadelphia. "People need to vote with their checkbooks. ... We're applying for a grant to do a really big exhibit of the collection, like you're inside it."

He also wants to fix the building, put in new heating and air conditioning, move the small zoo upstairs and start a new kind of display, known as "open storage." It involves displaying objects in a density similar to that of a storage area, and bringing them closer to the glass, so it "feels like you're walking through the collection."

In both places, Brown replaced presidents whose contracts were not renewed and were not active in fundraising. When he arrived at the Bishop, the Honolulu Advertiser had headlined an editorial: "New Bishop Director Has Small Shoes to Fill."

To ensure a similar headline isn't written about him when he leaves Philly, Brown started by setting up 15 working lunches in his office with potential donors for the next 15 working days.

"The way you get people interested begins with being interested in them," he concluded. "There are so many former board members and other people that no one has talked to and brought in for lunch, it's like a candy store of opportunity."

(editorial@citypaper.net)