According to a Facebook post from the University of Louisiana at Monroe Museum of Natural History, administrators have demanded that 6.5 million plant and fish specimens must find a new home on campus within 48 hours or they will be have to be donated or destroyed. Apparently, space is needed for the track team.
Photo: Getty
This is the full statement:
Dear Friends,
It is my sad duty to report to you that the ULM administration has decided to divest the research collections in the Museum of Natural History. This includes the 6 million fish specimens in the Neil Douglas fish collection and the nearly 500,000 plant specimens in the R. Dale Thomas plant collection. They find no value in the collections and no value of the collections to the university. The College was given 48 hours to suggest an alternate location for the collections on campus so that Brown Stadium can be renovated for the track team. With only about 20 hours left, we have found no magic solution yet. To add insult to injury on what was a very hard day, we were told that if the collections are not donated to other institutions, the collections will be destroyed at the end of July.
While we weep that our own institution would turn its back on 50+ years of hard work and dedication, we will not abandon the collections to the dumpsters. They did not have the courage to inform us face-to-face, but we have the courage to persevere through these dark times.
Oh, in other sad news, we were informed that there will not be any expansion of the public displays in Hanna Hall.
Gizmodo reached out to the faculty of the Museum today to inquire about more details. All of them informed us that they had been instructed to reply with “no comment” to any press that reaches out. We were directed to contact Dr Eric Pani, Vice President for Academic Affairs, the man who was responsible for the decision. So far, our requests for comment have gone unreturned.
Pani did give a brief interview to a local news outlet in which he walked back the severity of the situation. Framing the decision as a budgetary decision, Pani insisted that the Facebook post could be misinterpreted to mean that the specimens will be destroyed in a matter of hours. He insists that won’t happen until mid-July and that the leaders of the College of Arts, Education and Sciences were given 48 hours to come up with a plan to keep the specimens on campus. “Unfortunately, the fiscal situation facing the university over the years requires us to make choices like this. We can no longer afford to store the collections and provide all of the public services we have in the past,” Pani said. You can’t spell Pani without pain.