Duke University has decided to close its Herbarium and move the collection over the next few years - shock at this announcement has been rippling through the mycology community over the last few days - I imagine botanists in the southeast have been feeling similar, though I know less in that community. I don’t know, I just felt like it was a good thing to bring up so those who hadn’t heard who might be motivated to send a letter or sign the petition would have the opportunity.
Yes, there has been a flurry of emails among the plant folks at our department including speculations where things would go. I don’t think the timeline for relocating the collections is feasible given how much work and resources in terms of space and funding would be needed.
Unfortunately this has been a trend for many years, to close collections and consolidate for budgetary reasons, although it usually doesn’t involve collections with upwards of a million specimens. I suspect those making this decision don’t have a clue where the material is supposed to go and how that would be achieved to ensure its conservation and future availability.
The most infuriating thing to me is that Duke is not an underfunded institution. They have a huge budget - so the reasoning seems extremely disingenuous.
It just seems like an extension of the high school attitude that prioritizes sports programs while cutting the arts and sciences, on a grand and extremely detrimental scale.
Very unpleasant news, unbelievable and completely incomprehensible from the point of view of the duties incumbent on such a world-famous and respected university. I really hope this doesn’t happen. This is simply not the way to go, great loss!
Not herbarium but Suffragette history in London.
Library WAS housed in a building with history and then an architecture project to fit the purpose. Unceremoniously dumped in LSE so they could rent out the architecture for conferences.
The biggest loss in recent years that I’m aware of is the National Museum of Brazil fire several years ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Brazil_fire - though as far as I can tell the herbarium collection was one of the only things that was saved due to being housed off site.
This of course is happening all over and has for the past 20+ years. I’m curator of ornithology at our state museum (NC). Since 2008 we’ve accepted 4 orphaned collections (birds plus mammals, herps, in two cases fishes). Our malacology unit has probably tripled in size, thanks to universities “divesting” of collections. They haven’t figured out how to monetize these, so off they go.
And yet we don’t have funds to curate OUR OWN materials. We have had a decent array of volunteers doing prep and we’re sitting on our own backlog of recent materials. So the 4 orphaned collections sit but at least they are together, stabilized, and so safe for now.
When we take them we’re lucky to get a few cabinets - but of course we get zero financial support to do the proper curation at our end. We have a new director, and development officer, and they have just begu to seek outside funding to help with this.
Meanwhile, I got an email last week about taking the bird collection from the Univ of Kentucky…we’ve already taken their mammal collection and our mammal collections manager guesses “a couple thousand bird specimens? maybe more…”. The 4 collections currently ‘in limbo’ are about 2000… we will now have to stack cabinets onto a third tier, which I don’t like but, it is what is. “Space, the final frontier…”.
The MBA’s running our colleges and universities see no value in these specimens, or zoology/botany for that matter.
What this needs (sadly) is for significant Duke donors to withhold further donations unless the herbarium is retained - and for those same donors to offer new support to help permanently endow the herbarium (and its personnel positions) on-campus.
In the mail yesterday I got my copy of the latest Rhodora, the journal of the New England Botanical Society. The issue is dedicated to Robert L. Wilbur, a prolific, long-term, and dedicated member of the botany faculty at Duke. Let me quote from the first article, a memorial to Dr. Wilbur written by Foster Levy and Charlotte M. Taylor:
“Throughout his career, the Duke Herbarium herbarium was Wilbur’s professional passion and central focus. Although founded in 1921, it had served primarily as a teaching and ecological reference collection until he was named its curator in 1957. The herbarium now has more than 800,000 specimens, almost 400,000 of which are vascular plants., and includes 821 types. The herbarium is remarkable for its size in relation to the size of the university, in both its vascular and cryptogamic collections. Wilbur’s enthusiasm and energy for adding collections vis both direct collecting and specimen exchange tripled the number of vascular plant specimens during his tenure, from ca. 130,000 to ca. 400,000. He also worked to stimulate collecting of lichens, algae, and bryophytes by other Duke faculty members and students. Duke University consistently supported the herbarium with space, equipment, and personnel, including a full-time collections manager. This position was held for four decades by Sherri Herndon, who mounted most of Wilbur’s specimens and handled day-to-day problems for his students while ensuring that Wilbur did not miss classes or meetings.” (Levy, F., and C.M. Taylor. 2022. Robert Lynch Wilbur: botanist, mentor, family man. Rhodora vol. 124, pp. 115-132. The paragraph quoted is from p. 124.)
Dr. Wilbur died in 2022. He retired in 2007 and served as Professor Emeritus until his death. Reading between the lines, I have the feeling that the university seized upon his death as the opportunity to make changes that Dr. Wilbur would have fought tooth and nail against while he was alive. Instead of thinking of the herbarium an an extraordinary resource and capitalizing on it, the university has apparently decided they don’t see a good reason for Duke to continue in Wilbur’s exceptional tradition.
What a lovely memorial for a passionate scientist. And how infuriating that administrators would take his death as an opportunity to dismantle his life’s work.
I really don’t have much else to add here. I’m just still quietly fuming