Two federal grants supporting natural science stewardship and increasing accessibility at the Michigan State University Museum have been terminated within the last 24 hours, said Museum Director Devon Akmon.
Approximately $250,000 worth of in-progress grant funding was cancelled amid deep cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, leaving the MSU Museum to foot the bill for expenditures it anticipated being reimbursed for. Akmon estimated the museum had already spent $50,000 to $70,000 of grant money before the cancellation.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services is a small federal agency that awards grant funding to museums and libraries across the country. The agency’s entire staff of around 70 employees was placed on administrative leave at the end of March, amid the Trump administration’s gutting of the federal government. Other university museums have also reported their grants being terminated.
“It shouldn’t impact the day-to-day work of our faculty and our students,” Akmon said. “But as we go forward, we are certainly going to face challenges.”
One terminated grant to support the museum’s Natural Science Collection — which contains more than 111,700 specimens of mammals, birds, amphibians, fishes and vertebrate fossils — was cancelled with approximately $70,000 to be disbursed. The natural science collection, one of the museum’s three primary collections, had been used to generate more than 150 scholarly articles within the past year, Akmon said.
The loss of that funding will temporarily impact work with the collection, such as collecting CT scans of specimens, until new revenue sources can be found, Akmon said.
Another grant to create accessible pathways and develop audio descriptions to enhance the museum experience for visitors with visual impairments was also cancelled. Akmon said the museum had spent little of the $190,132 awarded before learning of its termination.
The MSU Museum has received 27 grants from the agency since 1999. The university has also received 12 other awards from the agency for various programs and for the Abrams Planetarium, according to the institute.
Although the grants represented a small portion of the museum’s budget, Akmon said there aren’t many other funding opportunities targeted at collection stewardship, which requires the museum to look externally for new revenue sources.
One such source could be the university’s donor community, Akmon said. Informing donors about how their dollars can help enable important work with the museum's collections, including the digitization of its collections, will be critical to funding those sources.
“It’s not looking good right now for the agency,” Akmon said. “There’s going to be a challenge for all of us to rethink how we leverage new dollars to support this critical work amid a changing landscape.”
Support student media!
Please consider donating to The State News and help fund the future of journalism.
Discussion
Share and discuss “Grants for MSU Museum terminated amid cuts to federal museum services” on social media.
