MIT on display
New museum director plans a visitor 'gateway' to boost institute's profile
CAMBRIDGE -- When John Robert Durant was a professor at London's Imperial College in the 1990s, he and his colleagues often boasted that their institution was the ''MIT of Europe."
But in visits to the United States, Durant was surprised to discover that many on this side of the Atlantic were unaware of MIT's contributions to science and technology. Even in the Boston area, few had ventured into MIT's research labs, wellsprings of innovation in fields ranging from robotics to molecular science.
''I sometimes wonder if MIT is more famous everywhere else than it is in Cambridge," Durant said.
Now Durant, 54, has a chance to raise the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's profile in its hometown and beyond. He's accepted a job as director of the MIT Museum and will arrive July 1 with an ambitious plan to expand it and make it a community ''gateway" into MIT. If he succeeds, Durant could establish a revitalized science center down the road from Boston's Museum of Science. He could also create an alternative destination for visitors to Harvard Yard who, if they stop at MIT at all today, just take a peek under its dome or walk down its ''infinite corridor" toward Kendall Square.
MIT officials concede the museum is limited today and acknowledge the school falls short in presenting a welcoming face to the community.
''When we give tours here for prospective students or for visitors, we show them buildings," said Alan Brody, associate provost for the arts. Brody sees the museum as the key to a larger effort to make MIT a destination for technology-oriented visitors from around the world and develop ''a program in public engagement with science."
Durant's new post at the MIT Museum has been vacant since May 2002, when the previous director, Jane Pickering, departed. The museum today occupies 35,000 square feet at 265 Massachusetts Ave., an aging and cramped industrial building outside Central Square. It runs a pair of satellite sites, the Compton Gallery and the Hart Nautical Gallery, on MIT's campus.
Among current offerings at the MIT Museum are prize-winning inventions of MIT students, MIT-designed robots, Arthur Ganson's mechanical sculptures, a holography display, and an exhibit called ''Mind and Hand," which traces the history of MIT. It also contains a model of the Saturn V moon rocket, which was used in the early 1960s to brief President John F. Kennedy on the Apollo program.
Mary Leen, the acting museum director, said it averages 70,000 visitors a year -- less than half the visitors to Harvard's Museum of Natural History and less than 5 percent of those to the Museum of Science. The museum fields about 2,000 research requests a year.
Durant's ultimate goal is a new and larger facility closer to the heart of campus. But that will hinge on his ability to raise money in an environment where museum funding has been drying up in recent years.
''Anyone coming from the UK to run a museum here will discover this is the only country that believes culture should be the product of a free marketplace," said Bob Rogers, chairman of BRC Imagination Arts, a Burbank, Calif., company that designs and produces museum content. ''Government doesn't want to spend any money on it."
Museums continue to tap wealthy patrons, foundations, and corporations, Rogers said. And local and state governments will pony up funds if museums demonstrate they can boost tourism by putting ''heads in beds," he said. In the case of the MIT Museum, most operating costs will be covered by the school, though Durant will have to seek outside partners to underwrite much of his expansion plans.
Currently the chief executive of At-Bristol, a science and natural history center in Bristol, England, Durant previously was director of science communications at the Science Museum of London. He is married to Anne Harrington, an American who was his doctoral student at Oxford University in the 1980s, and they have a 6-month-old son. Harrington has been on sabbatical in England but is returning to Harvard University, where she is a history of science professor.
Durant, who will also teach at MIT, envisions the MIT Museum pioneering a new model of public engagement with science, showcasing technology research, inviting technologists and researchers to make public presentations on their work, and hosting forums on the scientific and ethical aspects of such issues as aging, climate change, and stem-cell research.
''All of my professional career I've been interested in the relationship between technology and the wider community," Durant said in a telephone interview from England. ''MIT wants to use its museum to reposition its relationship with the community."
Rosalind H. Williams, director of the science, technology, and society program, where Durant will teach ''science community," said the United States trails European countries in bringing the public into discussion of science issues. Unlike Boston's Museum of Science and other US museums geared toward children and families, the MIT Museum will try to gear itself to students, prospective students, and adults interested in science.
With the Museum of Science building up its own current science and technology program -- it will open an exhibition on medical imaging this year -- there is bound to be overlap. But David Ellis, a former Museum of Science director who sat on the MIT search committee that hired Durant, said the much smaller MIT Museum has the opportunity to go into more depth on MIT's research breakthroughs.
''We have parallel plans that are very complementary with what MIT is doing," said Ioannis N. Miaoulis, the current Museum of Science director. ''They would be showcasing MIT technology. We would be showcasing MIT technology and other technology developed in the region and worldwide. I look forward to collaborating with them."
Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com. 