Pipeline Company’s Role in Smithsonian’s Alaska Exhibit Fuels Criticism

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit on the Trans-Alaska pipeline recently that is generating more heat than the museum had hoped for.

The problem, critics say, is that the company that operates the pipeline brought the idea for the exhibit to the Smithsonian, provided objects to be included in it, and paid to set it up.

“This creates an immediate conflict of interest,” says Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest.

“Ideally, the Smithsonian should avoid corporate sponsorship as much as possible, but they are moving in exactly the opposite direction,” says Mr. Jacobson, author of Marketing Madness, a book that discusses how advertising has become a pervasive fact of American life.

The Alyeska Pipeline Services Company contributed $300,000 to the Smithsonian to cover the cost of installing the exhibition, which portrays the technological challenges of transporting oil 800 miles across three mountain ranges and vast tundra.

To critics of the Alaskan oil industry, the Smithsonian exhibit, “Oil from the Arctic: Building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline,” is a whitewash of the 20-year history of the pipeline. Adam Kolton, of the Alaska Wilderness League, faults the pipeline exhibit for “celebrating this engineering marvel without showing the risks.”

Although there is a brief mention of the disastrous grounding of the Exxon Valdez, which spewed more than 10 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound in 1989, Mr. Kolton says that the exhibit is unbalanced in its portrait of the Alaskan oil industry. “It is really a failure to give the American people a complete picture,” says Mr. Kolton, who is leading the environmental organization’s efforts to defeat legislation that would open up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.

Smithsonian officials defend the exhibit, saying that the small exhibition covers a wide range of social, cultural, environmental, and engineering issues. Furthermore, they argue, it was designed solely by museum curators, without any interference from Alyeska.

“From the inside, knowing what went on, this was as close to ideal as you could hope for,” says Jeffrey K. Stine, the Smithsonian’s lead curator on the project. Even so, Mr. Stine concedes, “On paper it may look like a for-profit donor would have strings attached, and it may look like this is not appropriate.”

Roger Staiger, Alyeska’s Washington representative, says the creation of the exhibit was his idea and did not reflect a grand plan by the company to reshape its image.

As an engineer and someone who was familiar with the American History Museum when it was known as the Museum of History and Technology, he says, “I had always thought the building of the pipeline was more significant than many of the exhibits they had there.”

Mr. Staiger says he felt it was important to document a significant historical event that might easily have been lost. “In terms of archiving our history, we have done a miserable job,” he says. Mr. Staiger and other Alyeska officials made suggestions on what to include in the exhibit, but, he says, “to suggest that they accepted every suggestion we made would be wrong.”

The pipeline exhibit may be a particularly stark example of corporate involvement in museums, but it is part of a fast-growing trend.

Corporate sponsorship of cultural activities has risen sharply in recent years. Since 1994, companies have increased spending on sponsorships from $255-million to an estimated $354-million this year, according to the IEG Sponsorship Report, a Chicago-based newsletter on corporate marketing. Of that total, businesses increased museum sponsorships 41 per cent, to $65-million.

Nowhere has the shift been greater than at the Smithsonian. Since 1991, when the institution revised its policy to permit the display of corporate logos in support of exhibitions, the Smithsonian has aggressively sought out new sponsorship opportunities.

I. Michael Heyman, Secretary of the Smithsonian, says that corporate support is essential for the organization’s future growth. In a speech last year to the National Press Club, Mr. Heyman said that the Smithsonian’s efforts to entice business support offer great promise for the institution. “We have broken through the ghetto of traditional corporate philanthropic giving to enter the far richer universe of marketing dollars available for corporate sponsorship,” Mr. Heyman said.

But there are limits, he said. “No amount of money, from any source, should ever be able to purchase the contents of the Smithsonian’s exhibitions and other programs,” he said.

Critics of the current pipeline exhibit argue that Alyeska has done precisely that, since the exhibit was paid for by the company, much of the material displayed was provided by the company, and the idea for the exhibit originated with the company.

Museum officials outside the Smithsonian are loathe to sharp- ly criticize the institution. Most agree that some level of corporate sponsorship is inevitable, and even desirable. But they are equally concerned that institutions like the Smithsonian should make sure that corporations do not gain control over the contents of museum exhibits and educational programs.

Ellsworth H. Brown, president of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, says that he has not seen the exhibit. But given the fact that the subject of the exhibit and the company paying for it are one and the same, “It does raise serious questions,” he says.

Earlier this month, Mr. Brown led the Smithsonian National Council, an advisory panel made up of scholars and museum administrators, in a seminar on corporate sponsorship. While museum officials constantly have to weigh competing interests in deciding whether to approve a sponsorship agreement, says Mr. Brown, the pipeline exhibit is clearly problematic.

Experts on corporate sponsorship also view the American-history museum’s exhibit skeptically. “It is certainly going to raise a lot of red flags,” says Jim Andrews, vice-president of the IEG Sponsorship Report.

The problem is not just that corporate money may compromise the curatorial integrity of the museum, says Mr. Andrews, whose organization also serves as a consultant in setting up sponsorship deals. The appearance of a conflict of interest could also jeopardize the institution’s credibility, he says. “Even if it is not the reality, it is the perception,” he says.

Mr. Andrews says that as companies spend more money sponsoring these types of cultural programs, “they are certainly more demanding than they were in the past.” But he says that non-profit organizations need to walk a fine line between independence and subservience.

“We always make the point that non-profit organizations retain control of the situation,” he says. “You always have the ability to walk away and say no.”