A premier natural history museum has made hard choices to close a budget gap in its new financial year, which began this month. The 171-year-old California Academy of Sciences (CAS) safeguards more than 46 million specimens, including the largest collection of plants and animals from the Galápagos Islands, in its iconic building in San Francisco. Now, its leadership has imposed a 5% cut to the organization’s 600-plus workforce, with a disproportionately greater impact on CAS’s science division. “It’s been traumatic,” says Peter Roopnarine, a curator of geology there who has retained his job while four other curators have been let go.
Patrick Kirch, an archeologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a former trustee of CAS, says he was shocked to hear about the cuts, calling CAS’s holdings “one of the really great natural history collections in North America, even in the world.” Another former trustee, evolutionary biologist Craig Moritz of Australian National University, says there has been a lack of transparency about the financial challenges facing the organization and the goals of the job losses. “I don’t see an ounce of strategy in terms of the mission of the academy. It breaks my heart.”
In response to questions from Science about the cuts, the executive director of CAS, vertebrate paleontologist Scott Sampson, provided a statement saying the institution will rebuild its research capacity “as funds allow.” Sampson added: “As a scientist myself, I remain deeply committed to our focus on biodiversity research. … Our mission is to regenerate the natural world through science, learning, and collaboration.”
COVID-19 was not kind to CAS, which, like many other cultural institutions, lost significant income during the early days of pandemic restrictions. In May 2020, it laid off 110 employees, furloughed 92 more, and cut pay. With $23 million in federal aid for COVID-19 economic relief and a slow recovery in tourism, CAS refilled jobs and increased salaries over time. But visitor attendance is still down 8% from before the pandemic.
In March, Sampson predicted an $8.7 million shortfall in the $81 million budget for the 2024–25 fiscal year. He blames the drop in tourism, falling grants from the city, and growing health care and labor costs, among other factors. The gap was brought down to $4 million by cutting consulting fees, landscaping, custodial, and other expenses. But much of the budget goes to fixed costs for operations, including CAS’s Steinhart Aquarium and a four-story-tall rainforest dome. That left jobs for the cutting block.
In the science division, which had to trim about $700,000 from its budget, four out of 16 curators lost their jobs. Three other staff members in the division took voluntary buyouts, including the manager of the fish collection—one of the largest in the world.
“A great pity” is how José Sarukhán Kermez describes the losses. An ecologist with the National Autonomous University of Mexico and former director of CONABIO, a national commission in Mexico focused on the knowledge and use of biodiversity, Sarukhán Kermez is concerned that the cuts might hinder the ability of other institutions to study materials in the collections. A CAS spokesperson, however, says it expects “little impact on the collections and how they can be used for research.”
Until the recent cuts, research funding had remained flat at CAS, even though its overall budget has quadrupled since 2005. A declining share for research is “a pretty common trend” in museums, says Scott Schaefer, dean of science at the American Museum of Natural History. Relative to the size of its collections, however, CAS also has a considerably smaller research staff than other museums. “We rank really low in in that area,” Roopnarine says. CAS spends about 3% of its budget on research, not counting the endowed positions.
One of the laid off curators had an endowed position, which has surprised and alarmed some observers. “The reputation of the academy is going down incredibly by this,” says Michael Irwin, an insect ecologist retired from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He represents the Schlinger Foundation, which endowed that position and another curator position at CAS. Irwin says it will likely deter other donors. The CAS spokesperson says they intend to refill the position after the endowment has regrown enough to cover salary costs.
Sampson says he will work with the science division to come up with a long-term plan for growth. CAS will soon fill two endowed positions in botany that have been empty for years. That’s good news, says Shannon Tushingham, an anthropologist who left a tenured position at Washington State University to join CAS last year. “We truly want to work with leadership so we can get back on track and do what we do best.”
Rebuilding won’t be easy, says Kirch, who has directed the Burke Museum at the University of Washington and the University of California’s museum of anthropology. Expertise and familiarity with the collections is not easily replaced, he says. “It’s not like getting another ticket taker or another accountant.” And the layoff of an endowed curator will make recruiting top talent harder, he and others say.
“If you lose the curators, you’re not going to have the people who really know those collections and what they mean,” Kirch says. “You become just a warehouse of the world’s specimens.”
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/california-academy-sciences-reeling-budget-cuts
