The Providence Athenaeum under attack: the NY Times blows it

Alas, despite everything I had expected better. When my Athenaeum contacts told me Alison Cowan of the NY Times was in town for a story on the controversy over the sale of the Audubons, I expected her to do a reasonably thorough and impartial job.

Her article appeared yesterday, as A Bookish Contretemps in Providence. Another black eye for journalistic standards at the paper of record.

Here is part of the letter I just sent to the Times (links added):

In our town, two wealthy families and a handful of allies are attempting a hostile takeover of a nonprofit educational institution, the Providence Athenaeum. The deaccessioning of the Athenaeum's Audubon folio is their casus belli, but their espoused aim is not so much to prevent the sale as to seize control of an organization that they regard as their own, wayward personal property.

The deaccessioning is supported by the vast majority of the Athenaeum's 1000+ members, and by an even larger majority of its most generous donors. This support is both active and informed; the parties behind Save the Athenaeum have made repeated appeals to the general membership, each firmly rebuffed. Their lawsuit and their aggressive campaign to woo the press is not democracy at work, but the very opposite: a brazen and unprincipled attempt to override a majority by recourse to money, lawyers, and connections.

This is no secret here in Providence, and the story is available to anyone, anywhere willing to make a simple online search. Yet not a single Athenaeum member outside the group of 50-odd plaintiffs is quoted in the entire Times article, nor does it appear that any were even interviewed. [I happen to know my name was provided to the Times reporter, but I was never contacted -- D.] Instead, the plaintiffs are presented as if they represent the entire membership, and the struggle is misrepresented as one between members and management rather than between the entire Athenaeum community and a comparative handful of well-funded dissidents. [The real activists appear to number fewer than a dozen, the rest being family and friends -- D.]

The central, undisputed fact is that a minimum of 90-95% of the members want nothing to do with Save the Athenaeum, with most expressing outright hostility to the group's goals, methods, and rhetoric. Yet the Times article suggests precisely the opposite. [There hasn't been a single meeting at which the dissidents have persuaded anyone; quite the opposite, in fact: their strident tone, incoherent argumentation, and outlandish accusations have alienated many who had initially been sympathetic -- D.]

The article also inexcusably reprints a whole string of thoroughly discredited accusations, along with misleading and juggled financial figures that are presented without comment -- even though the reporter had been personally given point-by-point corrections, most of which are also publicly available online.
The article even repeats a claim that the Save the Athenaeum group offered a $2.5M pledge if the Audubon sale could be stopped, without noting that Athenaeum leaders flatly deny that such an offer was ever received. In fact, if such an offer had been made, and was then rejected or ignored, you can bet it would have been mentioned in the Save the Athenaeum group's many mailings to the Athenaeum membership. It was not; nor is it even mentioned in the group's own website (www.savetheathenaeum.com).

So Cowan gets my nomination for a Walter Duranty award for her fine work here in Providence. It's one thing to get caught in the middle of a dispute. It's quite another to choose a side, and throw all pretense at objectivity out the window.

For previous articles, look here, here, and here. The Athenaeum's own website also contains much material that somehow never got acknowledged or incorporated in the Times piece.

UPDATE: For New York Times editors and others who want to know exactly what I'm talking about, I'll be posting a line-by-line breakdown below.

PROVIDENCE, Dec. 12: The Providence Athenaeum is the kind of place where first editions of Robert Burns's poetry, medieval manuscripts and the latest best sellers nestle under the same roof.

True, but somewhat misleading. Despite some rare and valuable items acquired haphazardly over the years -- there are only two medieval manuscripts, by the way, and eight incunables -- the collection is fundamentally that of a working library that happens to have been around a long time.

The oil paintings are authentic,

Try "real".

and Oriental rugs muffle the footsteps of those who come in for the books, the lectures or simply for refuge.

Yes, there are rugs -- hardly anything noteworthy, though, unless you happen to be trying to paint the place as a sort of exotic treasure house that it really isn't.

Cellphones are not welcome, but dogs are, and the librarian keeps biscuits on hand for them.

A vestige of the days when America's settlers created private lending libraries because public ones had yet to be invented, the Athenaeum has been a neighborhood institution for 250 years. But like many nonprofits, it has financial problems: it habitually spends more than it takes in.

Bias alert -- key word: "habitually", implying both an underlying lack of self-control and a continuity of management that isn't there.

For years the officers and directors bridged shortfalls by dipping into the endowment. But with a drop in stock market returns, the board decided to sell off the prize of its collection, a complete poster-size folio of Audubon's "Birds of America," valued at as much as $7 million.

With the stock market collapse, the board realized drastic action would be necessary -- above all, more professional management, and an end to further depletion of the endowment. The Audubon sale is not the culmination of past fiscal irresponsibility, as the above passage implies, but rather a last-ditch attempt to set a new course. For this, the present leadership should be applauded, not pilloried -- and by most members, they are.

Now the birds are at the center of a raucous battle between the people who run the library and the people who use it.

Here we move into outright misrepresentation. The battle lines are actually drawn as follows: the staff, the board, and the vast majority of the 1000+ Athenaeum members on one side; on the other side, 50-odd dissidents, nearly all belonging to two extended families, following (for reasons of blood and class ties as much as anything else) a mere handful of active leaders -- surely no more than a dozen in number, and by all appearances closer to half that. By a very conservative estimate, 90-95% of "the people who use it" are firmly and vocally on the side of "the people who run [it]".

Patrons who oppose the sale complain that management is reaching for a quick fix to a problem of its own making.

"A problem of its own making?" The current leadership has been cutting expenses left and right. This is a classic case of blaming the doctor for the illness. There wasn't even anyone in charge of development just two years ago.

Officers and directors counter that the critics are trying to keep the Athenaeum to themselves by blocking a sale that would open the doors to a broader constituency.

Another subtle but significant misrepresentation. The dissidents are indeed trying to turn the clock back, and have openly said as much. They want it to be a clubby place for the right sort of people -- their sort of people. But the purpose of the sale is to put the Athenaeum on a sound financial footing (something the "right sort of people" rather neglected to do over the years). It is emphatically not to "open the doors to a larger constituency" -- that is the dissidents projecting their own fears.

On Dec. 8 the library announced that its executive director, Jonathan Bengtson, had given notice just two years after taking over. His letter of resignation, dated Nov. 23, cites the "lingering elitism among a small, but active, group of individuals" as a factor behind his decision to accept a new job in Toronto come February.

They've really made his life miserable -- he's your typical quiet, conscientious academic librarian, and they've gone after him as if he were the head of Enron. Less than two years in a new position in a new town, only to be scapegoated for openly confronting problems that predated his arrival by years. I don't think much of those who pick on librarians, nor of those who are ever ready to cast stones.

Mr. Bengtson's resignation capped a process that began last year, when the Athenaeum's beams began to buckle, propped up by little more than the floor-to-ceiling books stacked below them.

Although the need for costly emergency repairs is noted here, the fact that a significant number of recent expenditures were unexpected or nonrecurring was pretty much swept under the rug by the Athenaeum's opponents -- whose figures the Times article uses without comment.

With the endowment poised to hit $3.8 million by year end and another $443,000 operating deficit looming in 2003, the officers and directors decided to sell the birds. "We were drawing too much," said Susan Kertzer, the board president. Including this year's stopgap, the library will have drawn close to $2.4 million from the endowment since 1998.

Note that the figures cited are those of the dissidents, and contested. The Art Newspaper did a much better job here.

"Birds of America," a series of 435 hand-colored prints completed by John James Audubon in 1838, was one of the library's oldest legacies. Christie's, hired to handle the sale, predicted the birds might fetch $5 million to $7 million at auction. A safe bet, too. The last time Christie's auctioned off a similar Audubon folio, the buyer paid $8.8 million.

But the proposal, sprung on the patrons a few days before the library's annual meeting in March, did not go over well.

Initially, no. But once the facts had been laid out at the meeting, and at subsequent special meetings, virtually all of the members came to realize that there was no alternative. Many wrote eloquent letters of support, copies of which were provided to the Times reporter. Note that the plaintiffs saw fit to name Christie's as a defendant, too.

Museums have rules against selling items from their permanent collections.

No, they don't -- though there are codes (not universally accepted) that restrict how the proceeds of such sales should be used. In any event, the Athenaeum is not a museum. This line parrots the dissidents, who have continually tried to smear the Athenaeum for flouting guidelines intended for other institutions. Churches have rules about how they use their assets, too. Perhaps the Athenaeum will be accused of violating those rules next.

Libraries have more flexibility, Mr. Bengtson said.

Why make it a quote? Museum guidelines and library guidelines differ. That's a fact, and should be presented as such, not as one man's opinion.

Still, many members of the Athenaeum -- people who pay $30 to $180 a year in exchange for borrowing privileges -- as well as ordinary patrons

This seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that several of the plaintiffs suing the Athenaeum have never been members, let alone supporters.

were furious that the leadership was willing to jettison an important part of the library's history with little input from them.

"Little input?" There has been no shortage of "input" from the handful of sale opponents (much of it incoherent, slanderous, and ad hominem), and there have been quite a few well-attended open meetings where all could speak their piece. The Athenaeum leadership is hardly remote, either -- the staff is always visible at the library, and the board both turns over regularly and is broadly representative of ordinary library users.

"They're treating this thing like a used car," said Christopher Tompkins, an investment banker who helped organize the opposition.

A rather unconvincing cri de coeur -- unless Tompkins is in the habit of selling his used cars at Christie's. It has been strange to see persons who previously showed no great interest suddenly acting more bibliophilic-than-thou towards those who have devoted their professional lives to the study and preservation of old books.

Patrons and members denounced the leadership for failing to cut costs or raise funds.

Again, the ravings of a tiny minority are misrepresented as general opinion. As noted before, the current leadership has been aggressively cutting expenses and is doing its best to raise funds -- the last despite the enormous distraction of having to respond to a lawsuit and a constant barrage of hostile press releases. I understand some of the dissidents have also been making direct attempts to dissuade donors -- as unwise as it is reprehensible, if true.

Learning that there were years when the library did not have its financial reports audited,

The lack of audits was part of a larger pattern of ad hoc amateur management of long, long standing -- the very amateurishness that the present leadership is doing its best to get away from. And it is amateur management that the Save the Athenaeum crew explicitly want to reinstate. In any event, the 2002 audit came up clean.

critics said the leadership should not be allowed to plunder the institution's treasures to fix the past.

Without even getting into the implications of using the term "plunder", what is this sentence supposed to mean? That debts shouldn't be honored? If the problems indeed go back to "the past", why blame the present leadership for trying to fix them now?

"This is a classic case of a runaway board," said James A. Baar, a longtime patron and donor. "And they're trying to cover it up with a multimillion dollar sale."

This is a classic case of Baar's overwrought rhetoric. For a taste of the man, take a look at the Save the Athenaeum website (www.savetheathenaeum.com), and his personal weblog. Though he has spent much time denouncing the incompetence of others, his own website design business has a website that is, well, less than impressive.

For a city that cherishes its small-town atmosphere, what transpired next approached civil war.

True. Though this whole flap is being pushed by a couple of prominent old Providence families, there are at least as many members of comparable lineage on the other side. Just because you come from an old family doesn't mean you have to live in the past.

"We're a tiny town," said Elizabeth Mauran, a plaintiff whose family still has the original share an ancestor received in 1753 as one of 86 founders of the library.

Nice bit of fawning over old Yankee aristocracy here. It gets much worse though, as the reporter checks her critical faculties at the well-appointed door.

Her family was also among donors who gave the library $110,000 in 1994 to restore the birds for better display.

The restoration work was to preserve them, not primarily so that they could be better displayed.

"We want to work together when this is all over," she said, "but there's so much acrimony."

Big surprise! And who do you think is to blame for that? Launch a lawsuit against a popular neighborhood institution, all its officers, and all of its (volunteer) board members; publicly accuse them of mismanagement, incompetence, usurpation of authority, and worse; interfere with fundraising; spread outrageous rumors that the board has been spending the endowment on trips to Europe and putting their girlfriends on the payroll; and you might well anticipate a few hard feelings.

In April, when the library should have been basking in the glow of its 250th anniversary, many longtime patrons said they were torn as to whether to attend the celebration or boycott it.

Again, the indefinite "many". The benefit looked pretty packed to me.

The party raised $38,208 after expenses and though library officials said they were pleased, Mr. Tompkins was dismissive: "If you raised only $38,000 on your 250th anniversary, maybe it's time for a new group to take charge."

Resumé, please? Those now claiming they can do better are by and large the same old guard the Athenaeum's finances stagnated under during the past several decades.

In August critics of the sale, calling themselves the Save the Athenaeum Association, sued to block the sale, which had been scheduled for fall, attracting 58 plaintiffs at last count.

Including some who didn't even know they were part of the action, and who were in fact strongly opposed to it.

A temporary restraining order delayed the sale until the next court date in February. The plaintiffs are seeking to oust the current officers and board members for "willful and wanton fiscally improper actions" and are pushing to restore some of the influence they felt they had before a 1997 bylaw change eliminated the term "shareholder" and reclassified them as "members."

The 1997 changes were a matter of belatedly cleaning up nomenclature to reflect the major organizational restructuring that took place in 1974. It's a little late to start complaining now about what was done nearly 30 years ago, under the leadership of one of the plaintiffs (Edward Handy -- see below), no less. In any event, "to restore some of the influence" obfuscates the plaintiffs' openly professed goal of changing the Athenaeum back to a joint-stock corporation: that is, to seize control of a 501(c)3 nonprofit against the wishes of its current members, close it to the general public (who have subsidized it with tax exemptions for the past 30 years), and transfer ownership of it and all its assets to a select group of Providence oldtimers. This is the real story, the one that has been so effectively buried under the plaintiffs' strategic barrage of manufactured accusations.

Three directors have resigned since the lawsuit was filed, citing reasons other than the suit.

So why mention it? There are 18 directors on the board, and the positions turn over regularly.

One underlying issue for the Athenaeum is whether to continue as a clubby lending library or to strive for a broader constituency more consistent with a 1974 reorganization.

No, the question is whether to remain a private institution open to the public -- as it has been since it became a nonprofit in 1974, and as the majority of members want it to stay -- or become a private club, open only limited hours and beholden only to those descended from its original founders.

Ms. Kertzer, the board president, said the people who disagree made up a "small but vocal minority" of the Athenaeum's 1,000 dues-paying members. A look at the list of naysayers, however, reveals a group most nonprofits would love to have as supporters.

Fawning reporter alert! I'm not so sure most nonprofits would indeed be enamored to have "supporters" who turn nasty and file suit as soon as they don't get their way.

Two of the more prominent plaintiffs, for instance, are Edward O. Handy Jr., who ran the Athenaeum from 1972 to 1978, and Thomas P. I. Goddard, a scion of one of Rhode Island's first families.

Handy also presided over the sale of the Athenaeum's Edward Bannister sketchbook, which unlike the Audubons was unique and of substantial local importance (Bannister was a founding member of the Providence Art Club). Whereas the Audubons are to be sold publicly and professionally, the sketchbook was sold privately for a pittance.

The incumbents have sought to paint the dissidents as people who would fire librarians and close the children's room. "I was so offended by that," said Charlotte Handy, who, like her father-in-law, is a plaintiff in the suit.

Before she takes offense, she should pay more attention to what her fellow plaintiffs have been saying. They have indeed called for cutting professional library staff, and much more besides.

Though the board lacks the kind of people who can write six-figure checks,

Does it? If so, it is a testament to the democratic and egalitarian nature of the institution as presently constituted.

its members have criticized the dissidents for not putting up more money to save the place.

The reporter shows her colors: those who can't write six-figure checks apparently have no business criticizing those who can. In fact, the criticism in large part arises from the contrast between the plaintiffs' past tightfistedness and their present willingness to raise funds to spend on litigation.

Perhaps, but "no one will give money to them now," Ms. Mauran replied.

"No one" of the "right sort", of course.

She said that last spring the dissident group extended an olive branch, promising $2.5 million in pledges over five years, plus help raising more, if the library canceled the Audubon sale.

Shouldn't basic standards of reportage require some acknowledgment that Athenaeum leaders flatly deny any such offer was ever made? I've never seen any mention of such an offer in any of the dissidents' many mailings, nor anything on their website.

She and other dissidents said they were convinced that the current officers and directors preferred selling the birds because those proceeds would have no strings attached.

She may be convinced, but that doesn't make her right. What it does illustrate is how thoroughly most of the dissidents have demonized the Athenaeum's leaders, whom they believe capable of almost any sort of wickedness.

Mr. Bengtson said the sums being bandied about could not trump the sale of the birds as a way to put the library on firm financial footing. With $5 million or more in the bank after a sale, he said, "the picture is pretty rosy."

This peculiar closing paragraph makes Bengtson appear disdainful of any alternative to the Audubon sale. The fact is, talk is cheap, and there's been lots of talk among the dissidents about boosting the endowment and precious little action. It's not as if the Audubon sale was originally presented as a fait accompli, either: there was a substantial grace period for the sale to be cancelled without penalty if an alternative source of money could be found.

To be continued (alas) . . . .

BELATED UPDATE: Times article or no, the Athenaeum has prevailed in court. Read more here, including a followup on my exchange with the NY Times over their coverage of this controversy. For a telling contrast, see the Library Journal's treatment of the same story.

Posted by David on December 16, 2003 10:56 PM