It’s one thing to have to worry about how your basic American family of four is going to spend a few bucks to be entertained on Saturday afternoon. It’s an entirely different thing to have to worry about the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health scaling back their funding of basic science research.
Beginning Tuesday, John McCarter will be worrying about both problems.
That is when he becomes the head of one of the country’s biggest indoor family entertainment centers and one of the nation’s few independent (non-university, non-government) science research centers. Both reside under the same broad, commodious roof and rubric–the Field Museum of Natural History.
The sprawling, gray marble neoclassical box at the south end of Grant Park houses more than 20 million artifacts, from majestic dinosaur skeletons to Egyptian mummies to microscopic stardust particles.
McCarter, 58, is stepping away from a very successful career as senior partner at Booz-Allen & Hamilton, a globe-girdling business consulting firm. He becomes the Field’s seventh president in its 103-year history.
Selecting a businessman to run such an august institution, one primarily focused on education and world-class research, might seem like an odd choice. But it’s a choice many museums are making these days.
Americans visit museums about 600 million times a year, more than they attend all amateur and professional sporting events, movies and concerts combined.
As tourist attractions, museums can figure big into a city’s economy. Depending on their quality, they also add important luster to a city’s image.
To survive financially most museums now rely on admissions fees, public tax money and largesse from corporations, foundations and wealthy donors. That makes museum administrators accountable to a city’s mightiest precincts of political and corporate power.
Thus the decision of who will run a museum no longer is simply choosing the most notable or loyal curator in the institution. Most curators, highly specialized scientists steeped in their own academic disciplines, don’t want to be bothered with administrative duties, anyway.
Competing for customers
McCarter’s job is made all the more complex by the market the Field must operate in. The competition comes from other cultural institutions and traditional forms of entertainment like amateur and professional sports, theater and movies. Increasingly, museums also have a tough time luring customers out of their houses because of new, dazzling electronic home entertainment systems.
The best museums have been raising big money, and spending it on rethinking, refurbishing and enlarging their institutions.
More Top Picks Stanley Shp2150 2150 Psi Electric Pressure Washer
The Shedd Aquarium nearly doubled in size with its new Oceanarium in 1991. The Museum of Contemporary Art quadrupled in size when it moved into its new building this year.
The Field and the Museum of Science and Industry have been reworking their collections into big, dramatic, thematic exhibits.
Temporary exhibits, either traveling extravaganzas like King Tut’s tomb that visited the Field 20 years ago, or locally mounted ones like the Art Institute’s Monet show last year, can become the year’s biggest event for the entire city.
“You have to have a changing marquee on a museum nowadays, just like a cinema,” says Willard “Sandy” Boyd, the outgoing, much revered president at Field whom McCarter will replace. “People actually ask the question, `What’s new at the museum?’
“That’s how America works. You have to run with it, look at it as an opportunity to deliver messages.”
Boyd, a former law school dean and president of the University of Iowa, is himself a pretty fair example of the changing business of museums. In 1981, the Field’s board of directors realized it needed a tremendous facelift and new attitude about exhibits.
“The museum needed a good fund-raiser (in 1981),” says Toni Smith, a specialist in cultural institutions and non-profit organizations for the executive head-hunting firm Spencer Stuart.
College and university presidents happen to be among the most skilled fundraisers around, so that is where the Field board of directors decided to look.
They settled on Boyd, a choice that puzzled many in the museum world at first. But Boyd has been so successful both as a fund-raiser and as a museum executive that he is widely admired in the museum industry.
And, perhaps, copied. Only two other natural history museums in the nation have collections and research in the same league as the Field’s: the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. and the American Museum in New York. Both are now headed by ex-university presidents.
“These cultural institutions. . . . are multimillion-dollar corporations, with all the challenges that implies,” says Ed Able, president of the American Association of Museums.
“The day-to-day demands on a (museum) president’s job are less and less with collection and more and more in a management role. They are busy with fundraising, strategic planning and building relationships with political, business, cultural and community groups.”
Tough act to follow
In Boyd’s case, he proved his mastery at finding money on several fronts. Smooth and polished, he knew whom to ask and how to ask among rich patrons and corporate donors.
He proved adept, too, when political backing of federal funding for basic scientific research began to fade in the 1980s, and lack of funding threatened to shrink the museum’s research.
Forging stronger links with researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago under Boyd, the museum has continued to be a world-class research center.
When Boyd announced last year that he intended to retire this October, the job of the museum’s search committee was to find somebody who could maintain Boyd’s success in the $250,000-a-year post.
“You don’t apply for positions like this,” says Leo Mullin, vice chairman of Commonwealth Edison and the chairman of the Field’s board of directors. “The search committee seeks out people to see if they might be interested.”
The search committee approached national figures in the museum world and several university and college presidents about the job.
But several on the committee thought Boyd’s replacement might best be found locally, somebody already well-acquainted with the city’s cultural and philanthropic arena. Mullin, himself, thought of approaching John McCarter.
The only museum qualifications McCarter can claim are from his days as a boy growing up in Oak Park. McCarter says he used to haunt the Field Museum’s exhibits for days at a time, and was especially drawn to dioramas depicting early man. He fantasized about one day donning the pith helmet and khaki uniform of anthropology.
Instead, he went on to Princeton and Harvard Business School and the London School of Economics.
He was a White House Fellow in Lyndon Johnson’s Bureau of the Budget and oversaw Illinois’ first state income tax as Gov. Richard Ogilvie’s budget director. He was president of an international agribusiness company (DeKalb Corp.) and a strategic planning adviser to many of the world’s biggest food processing and food retailing corporations.
In his spare time, for the last eight years he has been chairman of WTTW-Ch. 11. As such, he has been a full member of the unofficial but elite club of Chicagoans who control the city’s impressive list of major cultural institutions.
That club is a mixture of descendants of Chicago’s early business moguls who established family fortunes in the 19th Century and of modern-day tycoons who head the city’s biggest corporations.
This loosely knit group has for generations run the governing boards of directors of the city’s elite cultural institutions. Those who serve on the boards do so partly out of a well-drilled sense of civic responsibility, and partly because of the social cachet attached to being on such boards.
As big as a university
There is even an unspoken hierarchy of prestige attached to the various boards. The most desirable is being on the Art Institute Board. Several institutional boards make up the next level, the Chicago Symphony and the Field Museum being among them.
Such institutions are a great tourism draw, which is a major component of the city’s economy, to the tune of $11.8 billion a year. The biggest reason tourists come here, according to a 1995 survey, is to attend cultural events, which includes museums.
Now McCarter will head up the Field, the ninth-biggest attendance draw in the city, with 1,263,453 visitors in 1995.
As a successful businessman, McCarter is familiar and comfortable with the upper strata of the city’s social milieu. At the DeKalb Corp., he oversaw plant and animal genetic research, an interest that continues with him, making him an easy fit with scientists, too.
More Top Picks Aprons Plants
“I feel thrilled about John McCarter,” says Boyd of his successor. “He’s as unlikely a candidate as I was, but he is not unusual in the tradition of the Field Museum.
“He is a person who is talented across the board. He understands public finance, and that’s important to us. He is an expert in soil science, and that is big in our future. He has worked with all kinds of organizations and institutions through Booz & Allen, and that is important to us, understanding institutional dynamics.”
His new domain has a $27 million annual budget and a staff of 450, including 50 Ph.D. scientist/curators.
“That’s as big as a fair-sized university faculty,” says McCarter, relishing the thought of his new job.
Under Boyd, the museum has gradually been updating and modernizing every corner of its exhibition halls.
It has also livened up the place by occasionally mounting spectacular new blockbuster exhibits, like its “DNA to Dinosaurs” that opened in 1994. Having an entry fee beyond the museum’s price of admission, such exhibits are designed to pay for themselves and to add to the museum’s general revenue.
McCarter says he doesn’t expect to veer much from that pattern.
The next such big exhibit, in the planning stage and still years off, is a $12 million extravaganza with a working title of “Life Underground.” By descending a basement staircase from the main gallery, visitors will enter a mega-sized version of earthworms and micro flora and fauna that manufacture Illinois’ deep, rich mantle of prairie soil.
“We’re going to shrink people down to being a quarter inch in height and show them how soil is formed in the Midwest and globally,” says McCarter.
But the quieter, more traditional galleries that make up most of the museum are just as important to him, McCarter says.
“You want a gallery of bird displays that an unsuspecting 13-year-old kid can wander into and become mesmerized and inspired,” he says. “That’s how you find the next generation of great ornithologists.”