The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921-1996

Terry A. Crowley is a professor of history at the University of Guelph,
and the former editor of the journal Ontario History. He is the author
of Agnes Macphail and the Politics of Equality and Canadian History to
1967, and the co-author of The College on

After a sluggish entry into the 20th century, museums got so caught in a
whirlwind of change that they have entered the 21st century as contested
spaces. The power of film and video and reductions in government
expenditures posed profound challenges for those institutions that
considered their foremost functions to be conservation of collections
and research. The blockbuster trend in mounting major exhibitions
brought new audiences, but at the expense of controversies such as those
attending the Royal Ontario Museum’s Into the Heart of Africa exhibit
in 1989 and the cancellation of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola
Gay display.

There is no typical museum; the word covers a vast range. One form is
the university museum, a marked legacy of the 19th century. The desire
to systematize, classify, and catalogue was so strong in academic
scholarship that wealthy universities frequently added lustre to their
prestige by creating collections housed and displayed in museums.
Smaller ones followed, as tiny, impoverished museums attached to
provincial universities in India testify today. The Peabody at Harvard
became well known, but the McCord Museum at McGill University much less
so after it began in 1921. The endowment accompanying the McCord, a
Canadian history collection, was so inadequate that the museum was
closed to the public for decades, although researchers were granted
access.

McGill University historian Brian Young’s study of the McCord is one
of only a few critical accounts of individual institutions in Canada,
but it is severely flawed. The author begins by recounting the McCord
family’s history before providing an uneven rendering of its lean
years and more prosperous times. His argument centres on how
commercialization of museums beginning in the 1980s worked against the
primacy of research and curatorial direction in favor of exhibits to
draw in the numbers; in doing so, it pays insufficient attention to the
development of museological principles and forms. In this essentially
local history of what should be considered a national institution, the
strongest sections concern the roles of women in the museum’s life and
the manner in which corporate practice has recently begun to transform
cultural institutions. In closing with his own departure from the
McCord’s board of directors and the dismissal of the museum’s
archivist, the author reveals how his personal entanglement in events
precluded a scholarly account of the McCord.