The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921–1996 by Brian Young (review)

HUMANITIES 307 These failings reveal this book=s origin as Dempsey=s master=s thesis. While it was an excellent, ground-breaking work when it appeared in 1987, it lacks the requisite upgrading and expansion needed to fill the same role today. Nevertheless, it is the best and most thorough work currently available on Canada=s Indians in the First World War, and, given the relative dearth of work on the subject, is likely to remain so for some time to come. (R. SCOTT SHEFFIELD) Brian Young. The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921B1996 McGill-Queen=s University Press. xvi, 224. $65.00, $24.95 It is possible that every university across North America has some sort of museum within it, be it publicly recognized and on the tourist map, or small, unnamed, and accessible only to scholars. However, relationships between universities and their museums are rarely easy. While research is central to the mandate of a university, museum mandates focus on general audiences. University museums, therefore, must balance access to researchers with responsibilities to broader publics. It is unclear how much tolerance universities have for museums within their midst or how many of the latter would like to escape to lead independent lives. Among major university museums in Canada, the Royal Ontario Museum formally separated from the University of Toronto in 1968; the McCord Museum, from McGill University in 1996. The fascinating question that Brian Young attempts to answer in his new book is why this latest separation occurred. He begins by describing David Ross McCord=s 1919 donation to McGill of >one of the three most important collections illustrating the history, art, and social life of Canada.= He then goes on to describe turbulent openings and closings of the McCord Museum over the next seventy-five years. As it struggles to serve both researchers and publics, the university copes with an increasingly expensive institution, and the political climate of Quebec shifts away from its Englishspeaking history B pulling both McGill and the McCord into a new world. As the turbulence builds and break-up looms, a curious thing happens to the author/historian who relaxes his commitment to history and turns towards an increasingly personal charge against the forces moving the McCord towards its fate. This charge is not entirely a surprise because Young situates himself, quite appropriately in his introduction, by making explicit his belief in the importance of history to Canadian society and the public=s growing desire to understand this history. He also exposes his passion for the >centrality of the curator in museum culture= and his disdain for the >new museology= which >totally subordinates collections and their past to an obsession with audience and the visitor as consumer.= This self- 308 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 exposure helps us to understand B though not necessarily appreciate B Young=s approach to the second half of the book. The new museology, I would argue, is in no way hostile to the curator, but decentralizes traditional curatorial authority to acknowledge and respect communities and sources of cultural knowledge other than Western-trained PhDs. It is increasingly evident that curators who have embraced the new museology, and who work directly and respectfully with communities from which histories are drawn, are re-emerging as a powerful force in today=s multicultural and increasingly open society. Thoughtful marketing, furthermore, is not obsessed with visitors as consumers, but accepts that visitors are those very people who, Young argues, want to appreciate their own history. Curators who continue in Young=s traditions may indeed be left by the wayside to be replaced by those who welcome the challenges of the twenty-first century. Trained as a historian, Young travels into dangerous ethnographic territory in later chapters. The awkward switching back and forth between history and personal comment, much of it self-serving, is both confusing and troubling B albeit a reminder of how subjective any version of history can be. The author frequently quotes himself in earnest arguments written to university and museum officials, but chooses not to balance these with arguments from other sides. In a surprisingly vitriolic attack, he blames McCord=s first francophone director, Claude...