Despite the the distressing news coming from the museums at Brandeis, Fiske, and a few other universities, there is great news coming from many of the nation's best university museums. First-rate exhibitions are pushing the boundaries of knowledge, and public programs are welcoming diverse visitors to what is often becoming a center for both campus and public life. Seeking not merely (although importantly) to shape future art historians and museum professionals, the Princeton University Art Museum and many of our peers are deeply engaged in the practice of fostering critical thinking and visual literacy, the understanding of times and cultures dramatically distinct from our own, the awareness of a common humanity, and thus, ultimately, the nurturing of good citizenship.

Here at Princeton, we have long crossed boundaries to partner with disciplines and departments from the humanities to creative writing to architecture to civil engineering. Our collections and temporary exhibitions provide sustained opportunities for teaching, research, and layered learning. Our collecting practices help to preserve the record of the past and shape the record of our own time for the future, fostering dialogues across collections and conversations among objects and with their scholarly interlocutors that go well beyond the history of art.

We are not alone in doing so. The Yale Center for British Art routinely connects with fields ranging from natural history to cultural studies; their exhibition this year on the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on subsequent creative practice was a model for cutting-edge investigation. The Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University offered a wonderfully timely exhibition looking at the art of propaganda during last year's presidential campaign. The new wing opened in March at the University of Michigan Museum of Art was designed to architecturally embody and make possible a commitment to deep campus-wide engagement, providing a second home for programming in performance, creative writing, film, and the humanistic disciplines generally. From Dartmouth, to Emory, to Wisconsin, to UCLA, great university museums are working hard to make themselves essential to the lives of their universities, even as they function as enormously beneficial gateways to those universities for the general public.

Like libraries that often also find themselves embattled in times of budget cuts (since typically neither museums nor libraries directly generate tuition streams), great university art museums are, to my mind, a “public good” offering value and possibility to the whole of our university communities as well as to users from outside the walls of the ivory tower. That all university museums do not achieve this centrality of purpose—often, I suspect, for lack of adequate resourcing in the logo-and data-centric university—is to be regretted. The potential, however, remains extraordinary, especially here at Princeton where our collections are nearly unrivaled in a combination of depth and breadth, allowing us to move with ease from the art of the ancient Mediterranean, to that of the ancient Americas, to the great painters, sculptors, draftsmen, and printers of Europe and North America, to the world of photography of the past 150 years.

One of the characteristics I have already come to prize most at Princeton is the fact that what it seeks to do, it seeks to do superlatively. We may not choose to have a business school, or a medical school, or a law school, for example, but the programs we do mount seek to be the very best of their kind. In that spirit, I look forward to helping the Art Museum build on decades of excellence to be among the very finest of academic museums. Much work remains to be done, however, to make the Museum central to the academic experience. Elsewhere in this magazine you will read about a number of new and sustained initiatives that are designed to enable the Art Museum to better serve the teaching and research missions of Princeton University and to be essential to the life of this great university. Despite economic challenges, it's an exciting time, and I look forward to your partnership in the years ahead!

James Christen Steward Director