"We found out that we were where the power was," Gavin says now with a touch of bitterness and pride. He is not ready to grant the University--or anyone else but his own friends--even a crumb of credit for the slow rise of the Harvard Semitic Museum during the 1970s. Gavin himself has never received anything more than an annual $300 honorarium from the University. His own salary, and virtually every penny the museum has spent in the last 10 years has been raised by his own efforts.
Gavin estimates that he has generated more than $1.7 million in corporate and government grants and private gifts. He waged his biggest battle in 1980, when the administration presented him with a bill for $19,000 worth of heating and maintenance costs. With the CfIA was gone. Harvard argued, Gavin would have to pick up the tab.
The fighting priest called it highway robbery, pointing to President Eliot's promise way back in 1903 to maintain the building forever. He says that pulled every influential string he could get his hands on, and that the administration acquiesced.
Bok declines to comment on recent University-museum tension, saying. "That goes back to decisions made before I was in office." And University Financial Vice President Thomas O'Brien scoffs at suggestions that Harvard could be swayed by pressure tactics. "Gavin is an awfully tough man to turn down," concedes O'Brien, "but the decision [to once again pay for maintenance] was not based on pressure as much as on the weight of the evidence....After going over all the issues, we conceded the wisdom of his position."
Gavin's campaign has culminated in the current exhibit. "Danzig: 1939," an artistic and photographic record of the Jewish community in that city on the eve of World War Two, and the surfacing of the museum on the upper floors.
This, then, is how a dead museum comes back to life, says Carney Gavin, with sweat and passion and hard-earned pennies. It pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.
Frank Cross, the museum's director, has his own explanation for the Semitic Museum's startling comeback. As an elder statesman of the thriving Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Cross likes to think that the museum's fortunes are intrinsically tied to the success of the department. He tells a story about the Semitic Museum that is not very much like Gavin's at all.
How does a museum build upon a scholarly foundation? According to Cross, it is a gradual, almost organic process. A small department builds a scholarly reputation through hard work, both in publishing and in teaching. It attracts more graduate students, who eventually win teaching positions at other institutions, and more prestige falls to the department. Finally, the administration realizes what is happening and creates even more junior and senior faculty positions.
"Suddenly," Cross explains, "the department was big enough to fill the building." And so for all intents and purposes the museum was reborn: The department had ousted the CfIA from the upstairs office space by sheer strength of numbers. Agreeing for the most part with Cross's interpretation. O'Brien says, "The museum just expanded into its space."
Cross, of course, warmly acknowledges Gavin's part in all this. But he stresses repeatedly that hard, quiet work will always bear fruit, and although the administration has other concerns now, Harvard cannot turn its back on the department forever.
We are left with two independent interpretations of how a Harvard institution comes into being: Gavin and his volunteers scrounge for pennies. Cross and his graduate students publish articles. Are they working at cross-purposes? Is the new museum heading off in two directions at once?
The current Danzig exhibit is perhaps the first symptom of this institutional schizophrenia. Neither Harvard nor the Near Eastern Dept. brought "Danzig: 1939" to the Semitic Museum--the National Endowment for the Humanities. Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Dorot Foundation, and a host of other private and corporate donors did. They answered Carney Gavin's letters because it seemed to them that the Danzig exhibit was of significant historical and cultural interest to the general public.
The exhibit deserved a visit to Boston because there are people here who want to see it: it deserved to re-open the Harvard Semitic Museum cause it seemed so consistent with Schiff's original dream of "promoting sound knowledge of Semitic languages and history."
The Museum did squeeze in one scholarly event among all the public lectures and films and special exhibits, an academic symposium on the Danzig experience moderated by Professor Isadore Twersky. But the symposium could have taken place without the museum and even without the exhibit. Holocaust studies, strictly speaking, are not in the domain of the Harvard Near Eastern department; nor does 19th-or 20th-century Judaica make up any significant portion of the Semitic Museum's collection.
Yet if the scholars had been left to their own devices, they could never have come up with an exhibit like "Danzig: 1939," an exhibit that carries so much meaning and emotion for so many people and attracts financial support from so many different sources.
But what is in store for the museum after the Danzig collection moves on in June? Provided it can come up with some display cases, part of that vast collection in the basement will go on exhibit in the upper floors. The scholarly machinery will continue humming as it has for a generation now. As Cross points out, scholars don't need display cases; they have been getting along perfectly well with the collection in the basement all this time. Without an attraction like "Danzig" and the high-gear publicity that accompanied it, will the general public bother to stop in for a look?
Jacob Schiff invested his money in a public education campaign: He believed in his heart that knowledge was the best weapon against prejudice. Carney Gavin has been scrapping for the last 10 years with the same ideal in mind. His legion of volunteers take the idea of public education very seriously; they want to tell everyone about the beauty and mystery and profound importance of Semitic culture. And they believe in the fundamental unity of Semitic peoples. Ultimately, says Gavin, the "survival of the planet" depends on the work being done at the Harvard Semitic Museum.
The dream is an old one, a dream that smacks of the optimism of the Enlightenment. Faith in the power of truth and knowledge holds a special place in American public life as much as in modern Jewish history. There is something anachronistic and quaint about Gavin's vision: What other archaeologist has such ambitions?
The Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, for example, says nothing about world peace in its catalogue. It is difficult to take such an ambition seriously: we have already seen the dreams of too many well-intentioned men end in frustration and bitterness--men like Jacob Schiff.
Still, it was this spirit that opened the doors of the Semitic Museum on April 5. And the people at the museum, to a man, will tell you that there is no contradiction--that a museum can be scholarly and popular at the same time. The administration seems to like what it sees, though O'Brien says that "when it comes down to dollars ... educational research [and not public exhibits] is the primary concern of the administration." Everyone at 6 Divinity Ave, hopes that one day Harvard will even offer its little museum a slot on a University fund drive. No one knows when that might happen, and University officials decline comment on the question. Until then, the two museums will get by on their own, side by side: graduate students burrowing in the basement collection; the volunteers printing T-shirts that say "Harvard" in five ancient Semitic languages.