C-SPAN/NEWSMAKERS

Host: Steve Scully

Guest: Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution

Reporters: Stacy Palmer, Brett Zongke

STEVE SCULLY, NEWSMAKERS, C-SPAN: Joining on Newsmakers on this Sunday is Wayne Clough. He is the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. And joining us with the questioning is Stacy Palmer, the Editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and Brett Zongker of the Associated Press.

Mr. Clough, let me begin by asking about the funding of the Smithsonian. About 65 percent comes from the federal government; the other 35 percent from non-federal government sources. The deficit continues to increase. The stock market continues to struggle. So are you looking for other sources of funding down the road and, if so, where?

WAYNE CLOUGH, SECRETARY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION: We are. We want to become, as I say, more self-reliant, because there was a budget challenge to the Smithsonian and most museums, even before the economic recession. And so we think we’ve actually come through the recession pretty well, because we had a tremendous increase in attendance. We are a wonderful bargain for the American people, since we’re free; we don’t charge admission. And so we’ve actually had some increase and we’ve turned around through some tightening of our belt to get where we want to go.

Now the question is how do we deal with the long term economic conditions that we face? And so, yes; we think we can, for example, in grants and contracts and philanthropy. We believe we will be more aggressive in terms of raising private giving; those kinds of things. And things that we might do in training areas and things of that sort, which we could earn revenues that would fit with our mission.

SCULLY: Can you envision any time where you would charge for admission?

CLOUGH: No; that’s not part of our scenario planning, our thinking at this point in time. I think the Smithsonian is America’s museum and when I go out and see all these families out there and we see the wonderful smiles on the faces that are there and the people who come. And they come sometimes multiple times. That’s a great thing for the American people. And if at all costs we can keep free admission; we should try to do it.

SCULLY: Stacy Palmer is the Editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy; first question.

STACY PALMER, EDITOR, CHRONICLE OF PHILANTHROPY: You’ve been on the job for more than a year now and can you take us back, when you were thinking about taking this job? The Institution had faced a big scandal, Congress was mad, public was mad, morale was really sinking. It was a pretty tough job, but then you had the financial challenges as well. What made you want to do this?

CLOUGH: Well you know I’ve always been a glass half-full kind of guy, so when you – those things that you just recited represented opportunity to me. I thought here’s a chance for us to really do something good about an institution that’s fundamentally sound and that people really love. And we needed to correct certain things that had been at-in errance (ph) in recent past and wanted to do something about that.

But the idea was to get morale back, to get people thinking together; to get people thinking about the future instead of dwelling on the past and we worked on that. And it’s been a fun experience. It’s been a – partly, for me, I’ll never take a job if I don’t think I’m learning something and this was a great opportunity for me, as a person who basically is a scientist or an engineer to really indulge my other loves, which are art, history and culture and to learn about those things.

So in addition I felt this is an opportunity to serve the American people. We are the nation’s museum. We are America’s museum and I had wonderful experience in higher education, but it was rather focused on a narrow segment of the population. Here at the Smithsonian, we are an educational institution, but we’re about youngsters who are very, very small, coming with their parents and their grandparents, who are young at heart. And we are about educating that entire spectrum and a much bigger demographic than we would get otherwise.

PALMER: You’ve talked about how your background as an engineer is helpful in thinking about how to change an institution. Could you talk a little bit about how that’s come into play and how you’ve moved this institution over the past year?

CLOUGH: Well the Smithsonian, as you know, is an institution with a lot of moving parts. It’s not just a museum; it’s a science-based organization, with people who study astronomy and astrophysics and we study climate change and rain forests all around the world, in addition to the work we do in the arts and history and culture. And so thinking about this as a system; thinking about what it all means. How does this add up? How can we take the disparate parts and put them together in a way to make surprising things happen? That engineering background has helped me, and the curiosity that I have about thing (ph).

SCULLY: Brett Zongker of the Associate Press.

BRETT ZONGKER, REPORTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS: Yes, you’ve been a longtime University President and a Professor before that. How does that translate into the new course that you’re setting for the Smithsonian over the next ten years?

CLOUGH: Well the Smithsonian, fundamentally, is an educational institution. It’s really about education. It’s about discovery. It’s about research scholarship that goes into the exhibits, so that we help translate that knowledge to a broader subset of the American people and many visitors who come from around the world.

So being a University President is about education and being – having come from a public university I think was particularly helpful, because the public universities deal with lots of constituencies and deal with a broader subset of issues than you might see in a private university. And so that experience was useful for me in understanding how connected we are to this mission of a state or of our nation is something I think that you get a little better because of that kind of experience.

But I love being around young people, too, and so the key to me is always being around young people and we see that at the Smithsonian. We had 1000 young people here on intern this summer and we want to do more of that.

ZONGKER: Do you expect to make science a bigger priority at the Smithsonian than it’s been in recent years?

CLOUGH: I don’t think it’s necessarily a bigger priority. We just want to make sure people know that we do it. I think some of that’s invisible, in a way, with the exception of the Natural History Museum and Air and Space that has a Planetary Sciences Center. Most of the sciences over time from the Smithsonian sort of moved off the mall, like the National Zoo. We-you know the Secretary at the time was interested in saving the buffalo; brought buffalo back to the mall, was breeding them on the mall and somebody must have said that’s pretty messy. Would you get them out of here? And that’s where the National Zoo came from.

And then we have 3000 acres in Virginia, where we actually do habitat studies and breed endangered species and reintroduce them in the West and the East, as well as all over the world. And so I think there are these wonderful things that the Smithsonian does in science that need to be available to the public. And we’ll use the Internet as a device, in a way, to connect that to the American people.

PALMER: Can we talk more about that? What is your vision of technology and how museums have to change? There are a lot of young people who don’t necessarily think that you have to go physically to a museum when you can just find everything on the Internet.

CLOUGH: Yes

PALMER: How are you trying to deal with that?

CLOUGH: Well, it’s an interesting question. We’re having focus group meetings with young people and with people that the museums don’t reach. In a way, if you think about it, museums actually reach maybe ten or 15 percent of the public, typically, is the number that you here. What about the other 85 percent? And in fact, can that 85 percent actually get bigger, which is worrisome, when young people feel they don’t have to go to these classical cultural institutions?

So reaching them where they are, we think is important. And doing it through the Internet is a relatively straightforward process in some ways, but we need to learn how to do it and think like they do. And so I’ve been visiting with focus groups to learn about that.

PALMER: And what kind of resistance have you seen on the staff? Do some people not like the fact that they’re thinking in a different way about technology? Sometimes that’s a tricky thing to get a cultural change to happen.

CLOUGH: Well, good question, but what I’ve found is the Smithsonian is a – the folks there are really creative. And they’re open to new ideas if they see how it’s going to work to the benefit of what they really want to get accomplished. And, yes, people do worry about – let’s don’t ignore the fact that we’ll probably have 29 million people visiting our museums this year; very important. The physical experience is very important.

So how do you use technology to enhance the physical visitorship to the Smithsonian? And then how do you use technology to connect to people who might not otherwise be connected at all?

ZONGKER: Looking into the future a little bit, how – what do you expect the museum experience will be like in the future; ten years from now?

CLOUGH: We’ve talked a good bit about that and what we think is that technology, for example, can enhance that experience. We still think the collections and the exhibits will be very important, but we call it now a learning journey, because if we can get people to, for example, use the Internet to inform – be informed and inform themselves and use it as a communications vehicle, two-way. That is they ask questions; we respond before they come to their visit and get informed on what they want to see before they come and find out what all the new exhibits are, because they change all the time.

Then, when they get to the Smithsonian, then their visit will be much more informed and they actually will know exactly where they want to go. They may have a handheld device in the future that will tell them where they want to go, because at the second floor in the Natural History Museum, some nook is hard to find sometimes and yet it’s a treasure to do that.

So, and then after they leave, they can continue to interact with our docents and maybe our curators. So we see it as a much larger and more enriched experience.

ZONGKER: You were brought onboard because of the resignation of Mr. Small, in large part because of the overspending at the Smithsonian. How did that happen and what’s changed?

CLOUGH: Well, I think the Regents became much more engaged after the issues that arose during Mr. Small’s Secretaryship (ph). And they did alot of the right things and they put in 25 new policy statements. And I tell people this happened at universities ten years ago, because we were all – we’re also non-profits. And we realized that you needed better oversight, better accountability, because we have a billion dollar budget. And part of it comes from the federal government; part of it we raise ourselves.

That’s a lot of money. You need to manage it well. You need to be good stewards of every dollar that we get from the taxpayer because those are hard-earned dollars. And so we put in a system and a framework of policies for oversight and accountability. We’re still implementing some of those because we had to buy new computer systems and do (ph) some of those things.

But the policies are all in place now. The Regents are attuned to the things they need to be attuned to and they have some new committees. They’re very actively involved in a positive way with the Smithsonian. And I think that that subset of these things and these activities have created a new organization and what I call a new discipline for us, which is what we need.

ZONGKER: Can you give one example what’s different? What’s changed?

CLOUGH: Well, we have new travel policies and, for example, I have to get approval before I go anywhere on my travel, which is a good thing. I don’t have any problem. As a University President, I had to do the same thing in a public institution, so there’s more checks and balances, more oversight on what people are doing and more making sure you’re doing the right things in cases where you know there’s a little bit of a gray area.

SCULLY: Stacy Palmer.

PALMER: In the search for private money, which we talked a little bit about at the beginning, how are you able to compete at this time, when the recession is so tough? You’re competing against food kitchens and other pretty desperate needs. How do you say that – to a donor that the museum is a really important thing to support?

CLOUGH: Yes. The – well, good question. And the fact is, though you know what I like to think is I’ve gotten to know the Smithsonian more and I’ve traveled all over the country meeting our donor base. People love the Smithsonian. They see themselves in some part of the Smithsonian, in a very special connected way we want them to see in the larger picture in the future. We think that will help fundraising that they see themselves.

Folks, when you work with a donor, they’re going to have local causes. They’re going to want to give to their university or their schools or their churches or their charitable causes, but they like to have a national cause. And so if they’re going to make a contribution to the country in a national way, the Smithsonian’s a logical – is a logical place to do that, because we represent the whole country.

PALMER: Have you been able to raise money to deal with some of the renovation needs that you have? There are apparently many crumbling buildings. People don’t usually like to give to that kind of thing. They want to give to, of course, the exhibit. How have you done in raising money for that sort of thing?

CLOUGH: This has been a good year for us, actually. We are – we’re probably going to end up a little short of a goal we set before the economic recession set in, but when we look around at our colleagues in the philanthropic world, we’re doing very well. So we’re grateful to our donors’ tremendous support. We think new ideas generate interest in things that people didn’t see before. We think context helps people make donations and we think good people make donations. And we have to tell our story better. And when we do that, I am confident all these issues will be resolved.

ZONGKER: Is the Smithsonian still pursuing some of the moneymaking endeavors that were started by your predecessor, such as the Smithsonian TV channel?

CLOUGH: Yes, yes, yes. We still have, of course, the Smithsonian channel and it is – it is a concept that isn’t quite there yet, because not everybody gets HDTV. I mean you start out at that subset of the category of people using it. I think we’ve enriched the programmatic content from the Smithsonian into the contract. And Showtime’s been very open and responsive to our concerns on that front, so I feel good about it.

When you watch the Smithsonian channel today, it’s a great experience. We just need to enrich the programmatic material on it and you know make sure we’re connecting it to the Smithsonian where we can. And we’re also working with new media, because there’s the YouTube; there’s all this kind of concept as well, where we want to connect to that next generation. They may not be watching TV. They may be watching YouTube. They may be communicating in an entirely different way. So we’re looking for other ways to reach people, but we think the channel is one of those ways.

ZONGKER: What kind of changes have you made at the Smithsonian in the past year; any changes to sort of set the new vision into motion?

CLOUGH: Yes. Well one of the things I’ve said from the beginning was that we needed to do a significant planning exercise. And I saw that, first of all, from the morale question. How do we get people to start thinking about the future; forget you know not forget about the past? Learn the lessons from the past, but our job is to focus on the future and to focus on the future in a unique way.

The Smithsonian, if we’re lucky, will be here a thousand years from now. This country will be here. We’ve only been around about 300 years, for the – for the country. We’ve been around as an institution 163. And so we really started thinking long term in our planning, with short term horizons and milestones that we would get. And we got people together from all these different parts of the Smithsonian talking to each other and it was a fun exercise.

And this was a very intensive, bottoms-up process; the first time we engaged everybody at the Smithsonian and we brought in people from outside, from other museums, from other universities, from other organizations to tell us what they thought. And that’s all being wrapped into a strategic plan right now that’s exciting.

PALMER: You’ve talked a little bit about reaching out to young people, but I know one of your other priorities is trying to make sure that the Smithsonian is diverse and is really representing what this country is all about and attractive to as many people as possible. What specifically have you done to try to encourage diversity at the museums?

CLOUGH: Well first we need to recognize that you know 20 years from now that this country will have no majority anymore and so we want to make sure the Smithsonian is fully aware of that and that we develop an approach towards our exhibits, towards our educational materials, and towards our collection that will prepare us for that period. And so we need to get ahead of that weight (ph).

We have a great opportunity. We have the Museum of the American Indian. We are building a museum of African-American history and culture that speak to diversity. We have the Latino interest group and the Asian-American interest group. And so we have the resources to begin to speak to this diversity question already.

Now, what we want to do is to make sure it’s ingrained in everybody’s thinking, but particularly I created an Executive Committee, which I chair, which meets about four times a year that looks across the whole spectrum of the Smithsonian to make sure we’re representing diversity and we’re thinking diversity. So when you’re going to do an exhibit, think diversity. Should there be a diversity component within that that you speak to, so you communicate with a larger subset of the American public?

ZONGKER: And you’ve talked about attendance being up this year, despite the recession. Are you getting a sense that there are new audiences coming in through the doors? And do you attribute any of this uptick to the big Night at the Museum movie?

CLOUGH: Well, we had some fortuitous upticks and one was the inauguration. We had 740,000 people go through the museum in four days; not all of them, looking at fine art, some looking for a cup of coffee, but they came, so that was good. And that won’t be repeated, but not all those were just inaugural-related.

But the movie; clearly, we’re beginning to see an uptick as a result of the movie. It is a great family-oriented movie. But we had over 30 new exhibits this year – this year. Our curators and our researchers put on some fabulous new exhibits that brought people in. And you know with the economy being what it is and we’re free; we’re a great place to go.

We just want to make sure when people get there they have a terrific experience and that they have lots of places to go to get that experience.

ZONGKER: But let me go back to the record visitorship. Are there any circumstances that you would charge for admission? And you currently don’t; why not?

CLOUGH: I really – we’re not even thinking about that. And the reason in, we think we can address our revenue issues that – the ones that we have with other things that we can do that are within our mission and that would be good things for us to do. There are places, for example, in some of the contract research, where we haven’t even recovered the indirect costs we should have been recovering.

We’re going to do those things first and see where we stand. There’s no question in my mind that we will – we’ll be able to rectify our economic side of our house, first of all, by telling our story better to donors and to the folks up on the Hill. They want to know what we’re doing; they want to hold us accountable. But with our planning and bringing everybody together, we will develop a voice for the Smithsonian and that will make people more amenable to supporting us in terms of the goals that we have; to increase our ability to serve the American people and, in fact, the world.

PALMER: And you talk a little bit about what some of your favorite things at the Smithsonian are? What do – what do people not know about and miss visiting?

CLOUGH: Yes. Well there are a lot of those and I you know I’m so fortunate to be able to go do – I usually, every week, schedule something you know that’s a little different than what the average person would get to do. Just recently I went to our Botany Department in Natural History. And they laid out all these collection of these incredible plants that they’ve got you know hundreds of thousands of these things that document different species.

And the beauty is they collected these things for years and years. Now we can do DNA studies on them and we can do much more interpretation of whether or not our species is going to survive or these species are going to survive, which is connected to our survival. And so talking to the people who go out and collect these objects all over the world; why do they do it, where do they go, and how do they do it is fascinating to me.

ZONGKER: You’ve talked a little bit about wanting the Smithsonian and the science of the Smithsonian to become a major player on the big issues of the day, like climate change is one of the things you talked about. Do you worry at all about wading into political waters there, since Congress is always right next door?

CLOUGH: Yes. Well that’s a good question. But we, at the Smithsonian, our position is that we will do our best to be honest brokers on these issues. We’re not going to be evangelists on one side or that other of the spectrum. What we want to do is to present information that’s useful to people to make their own minds up.

And the fact is, climate change is a complex issue and it hasn’t happened. It may be happening, but it hasn’t happened yet, so there’s a little sort of a prediction part of the story of climate change. So I was in Wyoming recently, where we have a paleobotanist who’s making excavations of a period around 55 million years ago, when global warming did happen.

And so why are we there? Because we can document what really happens when global warming occurs. And I cracked a rock open with my little rock hammer; bingo. And I’m looking at palm leaves in Wyoming. 55 million years ago, you this earth was very warm and a natural process global drove warming.

So what’s happening in terms of the climate is a combination of natural and manmade influences. And our job is to try to provide solid information to help people understand the story. It’s a complex story, because carbon comes from a lot of different places and we want to be the honest broker on these kind of issues.

ZONGKER: How can you trace the timeframe; 55 million versus 30 million years ago?

CLOUGH: Yes. Well 55 million years is based on dating of the strata that are out in Wyoming near Worland, Wyoming, near the home of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But you can – you can actually date those profiles and you can measure the carbon isotopes in the layers and you can see what kind of carbon were there and where the sources of carbon came from. And you can see, for example, that was about the time that mammals were beginning to make sort of a run after the dinosaurs were gone.

And so they disappeared and then mammals kinda of came in. And some of the mammals survived that period. They were really tiny. There were horses the size of cats, for example, roaming around out at that time and so you can see a lot of very interesting things going on in that period.

PALMER: One of the things you did at Georgia Tech was to internationalize the institution. How do you see that translating at the Smithsonian? Is it a global institution and should it be more of one?

CLOUGH: It is in a way, because we like to say that we were in 90 different countries with some of our activities, some of which represent physical platforms, in Panama, for example, or in Chile, where we have the great telescopes or in Mpala, Kenya, where I visited recently, where we have 50,000 acres, where we monitor the health of these magnificent creatures and how they interact with human beings in Kenya and so forth.

But the – I think the interesting thing is there’s a twist on one of Brett’s earlier questions, and that is we are largely – we’re more international in the sciences than we are in history, arts and culture. We should have a balance. And there’s a case were history, arts and culture needs to increase its profile and so we’re working with the State Department on some initiatives and looking for ways that we can help the State Department and the goals of the present administration in terms of building ties to other countries.

PALMER: What might that entail?

CLOUGH: Well it might entail artists traveling abroad. We’ve had folks who are historians of jazz going out and performing jazz, if you will. It might involve – right now, we just had the – one of the top people in the museum world in Egypt; they’re going to build several science museums. They were here; they wanted to know how do you build science museums? How do you build collections? We’re obviously the experts on that. And so we have a group of our people helping that gentleman and his delegation understand how you run a big museum complex.

ZONGKER: You’ve talked a little bit about facilities, but they’re – that’s a major challenge for the Smithsonian with a $2.5 billion backlog on maintenance. Have you – have you been able to secure some stimulus funding to get started on a little bit of that work? And what are you tackling first?

CLOUGH: OK. So, well first I would say, as an engineer, that number intrigued me; $2.5 billion. I wondered how it got so big. It’s not as big as it sounds, because it’s not deferred backlog. That was actually a plan to try to address, over time, the maintenance – the continuing maintenance issues and some of the revitalization issues that are concerned.

We haven’t really changed that plan. We’re still looking at that plan. We’d still like to get those maintenance dollars and revitalization types of projects. And so we’re – I just think we’ve rationalized it in a better way. We know what the job is ahead of us.

Stimulus funding, we did get $25 million for facilities in the stimulus plan. We would have liked to have gotten a little more, but we’re going to do a great job. We’ve already done all the commitments that need to be made in terms of the laws, expectations; in fact, we’re way ahead of it. And if you go to the grand old Arts & Industries Building right now you’ll see scaffolding. And so that’s stimulus money at work and we’re using in a number of places where we have critical issues, particularly anything that sort of becomes close to a safety issue.

PALMER: It’s not just the buildings themselves, but the people in them who make the museum alive. Do you have enough of the scholarly infrastructure or do you have enough people? I know there have losses over the years of the members; people who have been able to work at the museum. Are you being able to rebuild that?

CLOUGH: Yes. That’s – well that’s the fundamental issue, I think, because when we look at the present recession, we tend to get absorbed in what’s happening today. The real issue is the continuous trend and the continuous trends have been downward. As we’ve been asked to absorb higher energy costs and these kind of things, it’ comes out of our total budget, which impacts the budget we can put into people.

And so we have lost upwards of 600 people over the last ten years in our permanent workforce. We now have more volunteers than we do permanent people. I love our volunteers. Thank God for them; we couldn’t do our job. But we need to have the permanent staff and that’s why we’re trying to come to this stabilization point, where we’re not declining. We have an ability to sustain ourselves, going out in the next ten, hundred and maybe even a thousand years, to do what we need to do for the American people.

ZONGKER: Before we go to break, Zongker with a last question. You’ve referred to the Smithsonian, as others have, as America’s attic. Is there something …

CLOUGH: Not – I wouldn’t say America’s attic.

ZONGKER: Well-treasures.

CLOUGH: Yes.

ZONGKER: Is there something that you want to showcase that is not currently being showcased?

CLOUGH: Well we have a 137 million objects in our collections and I don’t use the word attic, because attic has that connotation of kind of dusty and things – people put things there they’re not using. That’s the reason I don’t use that word, attic; cause the Smithsonian is a vital, happening place. So …

ZONGKER: So based on that…

CLOUGH: Yes. But we have a hundred and thirty …

ZONGKER: What’s in storage that you want to showcase?

CLOUGH: Yes. Well, in these collections and all of our places where we keep them; they’re maintained in temperature and humidity control that’s what we work on (ph), so to preserve them. But we need to let these things be seen by people who own them. The American public owns these 137 million things and at any given time you’ve probably seen them more than one percent of those things and if you go to all of our museums, which is a trick into (ph) itself.

So the objective is to say let’s make it available. We shouldn’t hide anything. We should put everything out there. We want to provide context through our curators and our scholars about these objects, because each one has a story imbedded in it, which is an amazing story. And so the objective is to use the Web as a way of getting them out, put context around them, build an educational program at the Smithsonian that explains those things to K through 12 children all over the country and then they’ll want to see the real thing.

ZONGKER: With the changes you’re trying to make along those lines, do you think people will start to think about the Smithsonian differently in the years to come?

CLOUGH: I’d like to think so. I think so. I think they, first of all, will see a more holistic view of the Smithsonian. They’ll realize that we do have sciences and we do have this – the research is very deep at the Smithsonian, whether you’re talking about history, arts, culture or science. There’s always research about what’s going on and then think about the people in those terms (ph), so I would hope so.

I think they would hopefully see us as a cutting edge place, as a place where things can happen that can be a lot of fun at the Smithsonian. We don’t always have to be serious and we can have fun things going on at the Smithsonian. So you know we have popular cultures collections. I was just looking at a painting that Tony Bennett gave us of Duke Ellington you know. That was a wonderful thing for him to do and I have the great opportunity to see him next week.

So, but these are the kinds of things the Smithsonian can do. I think if people see us as a place, not as always serious and staid, but a place where it’s fun to go. New things are happening; new exhibits are happening. And we’re communicating with you in a way so it’s a two-way street, as opposed to, in the past, you come, we tell you what to see. In the future, because of the Internet, you will be able to tell us what you think. And in some cases, you will tell us something about an object that we have we didn’t know about.

SCULLY: Wayne Clough, as you begin your second year as the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, thanks very much for joining us here on C-SPAN.

CLOUGH: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

SCULLY: We continue the conversation with Brett Zongker of the Associated Press and Stacy Palmer of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. Stacy, what did you learn?

PALMER: I think we learned that Wayne Clough is a very good fundraiser and one of things you could see in the way he talked about the Institution and his love, his passion for it and his vision for the future and that’s what will help the organization raise the money it needs to survive. And the fact that he said things were going well in terms of fundraising is a huge statement.

In the non-profit world these days, people are saying that you know just staying flat is a good thing, because it’s so daunting to raise money right now. So the fact that they’re doing well in these tough times is a good sign for the future.

SCULLY: And you were bringing up a line of questioning about the online changes; the Web developments at the Smithsonian. What have you been seeing over there?

ZONGKER: I think he’s already tried to bring an online pilot program for K through 12 students to talk about the Lincoln Bicentennial. They did it as a pilot for 5000 students this past spring and they want to do that type of thing again to talk about climate change and to be a major player in education, where the Smithsonian hasn’t been before.

SCULLY: Clearly he came on board because of Lawrence Small, as we talked about earlier; his own resignation. Can you follow up on the question that we had with him on that and what Mr. Clough inherited?

PALMER: I think what’s important is that he’s had to institute a number of changes, working with his governing board, because there was just a culture at the Smithsonian of rampant spending, conflicts of interest, all kinds of problems and he’s clearly had to move quickly to deal with that. And he brings experience from the world of running a college. And as he said you know the Smithsonian was about ten years behind where other institutions were, so he’s had to bring them up quickly. And he probably has more to do, because it’s a sprawling institution and it’s a very difficult one to run, but he certainly has moved quickly to put a lot of things in place that will make Congress and the public trust the institution a little bit more.

SCULLY: And clearly a lot of that – this came up last year, but just looking back a year later, what happened and why was there no oversight?

PALMER: One of the things that the board was a very high-powered board; people like Supreme Court Justices, the Vice President of the United States were on the board, but they don’t really have so much time to be spending looking at the Smithsonian, so they weren’t watching very carefully. And Mr. Small was accused of keeping a lot of things to himself and then really just deciding that he was going to act like a corporate executive, rather than a non-profit executive. And he got into a lot of trouble for doing that when that was discovered.

The board contemplated resigning at one point, because they realized they were so in the dark that they weren’t doing their oversight job. But in the end they decided what they needed to do was overhaul themselves and they’ve done things like invite the public to attend board meetings and other kinds of things to ensure more openness and trust. But it was a very messy situation and there are conflicts of interest throughout the museums. You know there was a scandal a week in the Washington Post, so it was a pretty big job that he inherited to have to clean this up.

SCULLY: In the course of this conversation, did anything surprise you?

ZONGKER: Not really. I think – I think a scientist is in charge at the Smithsonian again and that had been their long tradition, so it’ll be really interesting to see where he takes the place and what kinds of issues he focuses on and focuses their resources on in the future.

SCULLY: His biggest challenge?

PALMER: To try to survive in this financial atmosphere. He’s going to be squeezed with private money is hard to come by; government money is hard to come by. He’s done OK this year, but in the future it’s just going to get more challenging in the years ahead, so I you know I think he’s got a great vision, but getting the money behind it to carry it out is going to be tough.

SCULLY: To both of you, thank you for sharing your line of questioning today on C-SPAN’s Newsmakers. Appreciate it.

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