Recorded on Friday, May 30, 2025

TRANSCRIPT

Jim Sailer ’90 Good evening everyone. Welcome. It's great to see you all here. My name is Jim Sailer. I'm the Vice President of the college's Alumni Council. The Alumni Council leads the Alumni Association. And if you're an alum of Swarthmore College, you're a member of the Alumni Association, whether you like it or not. And I'm so pleased to welcome you here for this, what we call a SwatTalk. SwatTalks just started in 2019. They're a project of the Alumni Council at Swarthmore, and they're brought to you with a lot of support from the college itself and the team here at the college. But the goal was to showcase the talent and expertise of Swarthmore alumni and faculty and staff. And we have free virtual seminars that we do about 10 times a year. This is the very first in-person seminar or session of SwatTalk that we have done, and it's also being live streamed as well. So, it's an exciting night for us. We have a variety of different kinds of SwatTalks that we have done from, the making of the Opera X, the life of Malcolm X with Kip Davis, and we had one on public health and public trust from Ann Shoeshot. And Kip and Ann, I think, are both attending this alumni weekend here. We had one about how parents can motivate their kids in school and the state of American community as a fourth one by Robert Putnam, our famous alum. I do wanna take one minute to recognize someone in the audience here. So, we are members of Alumni Council, and I want to raise and thank the president of the Alumni Council, Ayanna Johnson, who is president of the Alumni Council for one more day. And so, there's Ayanna, she can wave. Thank you so much for being here, Ayanna, and for your incredible service to the college over many, many years, of which this is just one piece of that. It's also good, I mentioned I'm the Vice President, Ayanna's my boss, so I've ticked off that very well as too. Our program tonight will feature President Valerie Smith, who's going to introduce President Sean Decatur. You're getting a theme here. There's lots of presidents around. Sean will make his remarks, and then take questions from the audience. Now we have some ushers who have kindly agreed to take index cards and give you pens. When you're done, you can keep the pen, okay? As our gift to you, you can keep the pen. And if you just wave and raise your hands or Fritz and some others are. So, when the time comes, if you want to ask a question, you feel free to ask a question, you'll write that down. Try to write as legibly as possible because I'm going to be reading the questions and asking Sean the questions. This is actually very similar to the format we use when we do these online, if you've seen them. So, I'm gonna move into, very quickly I just wanna say I do have the honor of introducing President Valerie Smith. And I just wanna say that this is a time, as we all know, when the very existence of institutions of higher education in America are under threat. And we have a strong divergent set of opinions in the United States held by students and faculty and staff and alumni and politicians and the general public all throughout society, not just about Swarthmore, but about many and most institutions of higher education. And those debates go about what the role and nature about of these institutions should play in our society. And given that these debates are so controversial, so difficult, and swirling around, I personally think that we are so fortunate at Swarthmore to have someone of Val Smith's intelligence, integrity, wisdom, and thoughtfulness to lead Swarthmore during this very, very challenging time. I can't possibly list all of Val's achievements in her 10 years. This is her 10 year anniversary at Swarthmore. I can't possibly list all her achievements. I will mention that there's a strategic plan for Swarthmore that's on the website, it's called Swarthmore Forward, and it talks about students and it talks about the kind of education and the kind of facilities and everything else that the college wants to have. And, so Val is leading that implementation, which is gonna be a multi-year implementation alongside just one other thing that's going on that you see all the physical evidence of around campus, which is Swarthmore's goal to be net carbon neutral by 2035, and all the amazing work that has been done and is being done to make that happen. I could go on and on, but I know what you really want to hear is you want to see and hear Val and then you want see and hear Sean. So I'll just say, ladies and gentlemen, it's my great pleasure to introduce the President of Swarthmore College, Valerie Smith.

President Val Smith Good evening, everybody. Thank you so much for that warm and kind introduction, Jim. Well, welcome to our very first live alumni weekend SwatTalk. I want to thank the Alumni Council for organizing what I am sure will become a wonderful tradition for future alumni weekends. Like all of you, I am looking forward to a robust discussion between Sean Decatur, a member of the Board of Managers, and Jim, our incoming Alumni Council President, followed by lively conversation and a session of of questions and answers with the audience. Both Sean and Jim are members of the class of 1990, and I am delighted to, yes, and I am delighted to see them back this weekend for their 35th reunion. So, I have the honor of introducing Sean to you this evening. Sean Decatur is President of the American Museum of Natural History, one of the world's preeminent scientific, educational and cultural institutions. Since joining the museum in April, 2023, he has presided over the opening of the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, And Innovation, has prioritized and accelerated the museum's work to address its challenging historical legacy, collecting practices and cultural representation. And has become a spokesperson for the ways museums can redress past practices, including more diverse perspectives and serving broader audiences. Prior to joining the museum, Sean Decatur served for nearly a decade as President of Kenyon College, during which time Kenyon achieved significant gains in the strength and diversity of its student body, resources for financial aid, and the breadth and distinction of faculty, enhancements to the campus, and record enrollments despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Sean Decatur serves on the board of trustees of Bank Street College of Education, and the board of directors of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, the Joyce Foundation, and New York City Tourism and Conventions. He has served on numerous advisory boards, including the board on life sciences at the National Academy of Sciences, as Chair of the Advisory Committee for the Center for the Advancement of Science, Leadership, and Culture, at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and as chair of the Codon Learning Scientific Advisory Board. Prior to joining Kenyon College, Sean was Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Oberlin College, where he was also a professor of chemistry and biochemistry. And before that, he was a professor at Mount Holyoke, where he helped establish a top research program in biophysical chemistry, and was a visiting scientist at MIT. He has won research grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, and from private foundations including the Alzheimer's Association and the Dreyfus Foundation. And he is the author of numerous scholarly articles. He has won a number of awards, including the Foreign Policy Association Medal in 2023. And he's a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Swarthmore, Sean earned his PhD in biophysical chemistry from Stanford University. Please join me in welcoming Sean Decatur to the stage.

Sean Decatur ’90 So, good evening. It is great to to see you all. Thank you, Val, for that incredibly generous introduction. And thank you, Jim and the Alumni Council, for this event here tonight, and the larger series of SwatTalks. I would say, as someone coming back for reunion, to celebrate a reunion this year, the opportunity to give a SwatTalk is particularly meaningful. And I'd say, you know, the right combination of exciting and terrifying that somehow reproduces that notion of the expectation of giving a seminar. And along the train ride here, just thinking of how unprepared I was for giving a seminar today. And so, you know, absolutely recreating my memories of the Swarthmore experience. And so, no, it's great, it is great to be able to participate in that. So, in the spirit of a seminar, I'm going to lay just a bit of a general groundwork about the American Museum of Natural History, lead into some of the things which I think are, on a very high level, touching on some areas of importance. And I think areas of challenge as we look ahead to the next few years. And then I'm going to stop and Jim is going to facilitate a conversation that I hope we can all participate in about what some of those broader issues and challenges that the museum faces that I think are also challenges for the broader community, both here in the US and globally. So, first, some background about AMNH. So, American Museum of Natural History is a little over 150 years old, it was founded in 1869. And I want to dwell on the mid-19th century for a moment when AMNH was founded because, you know, it's hard to to think about the context of that time, but it was really a golden era of scientific discovery. If we think about the mid-19th century, this is the era of Darwin and the early publications of around natural selection. It is the era of Mendeleev and the periodic table. It's the era of Pasteur and germ theory of disease, you know, a really major revolutionary point, inflection point in scientific developments in a number of fields. It's also a point where, at least within the US, there was deep concern about urbanization, industrialization, what that meant not only for the immediate environment to growing cities, but also what it was going to mean to society as generations were being further and further removed from the natural world. And so, how do we think about developing an appreciation of nature and appreciation of conservation and understanding of what the issues were around conservation in an increasingly industrialized and urbanized society. It's also, I think, one of the many high points of misinformation and disinformation in the US. And I think in New York, one of hallmarks of that was another American museum that in the mid-19th century was in southern Manhattan. P. T. Barnum's American Museum. Barnum's American Museum was by far the most visited attraction in New York City until it burned down in the early 1860s. And one of its hallmarks were dioramas, which for those of you who've been to AMNH, sounds familiar. But there were dioramas that combined real animals, real things from the natural world with, you know, mermaids and unicorns and things that were fantastical, and a real intentional blurring of the lines between what was real and what was not real. And a confusion behind what scientific evidence meant and how you could interpret scientific evidence to explain the world. And that notion of sort of misinformation about the world, and that was, I think, summed up in the Barnum Museum, is something that you see in a wide range of kind of cultural artifacts of that time. So, the founding of AMNH comes at this moment where there is intense interest in scientific discovery, where there is an intense interest in finding ways to bring to a city like New York connections to conservation in a natural world and a sense of the importance of that, and the sense of the need to make sure that authentic scientific evidence and authentic description of scientific discourse was being brought to the public. And so that's the context in which AMNH was founded. It originally was in the Arsenal in Central Park. It moved to its own building on 77th Street, West 77th Street, in the 1870s. This is a picture of what the facade that looks familiar to those of you who might have been on West 77th Street recently. That same facade is there. And from the very beginning, it was dedicated to both scientific research, and scientific education and engagement with the public, with the idea that those two things needed to come together. Because in order to bring a sense and a deep understanding of research and a sense of the authenticity of science, the idea was that you needed to have real scientists or active scientific research going on in the place where the public would be experiencing and learning about the science. So, from the very beginning, the scientific research institute and the public museum, it also became very popular. So, when the new building opened in 1877, there were 850,000 visitors in just the first nine months. And so, it instantly became a very popular place. And much to New York's pride, far more popular than the London Museum of Natural History, which in many ways is the institution it's modeled after. So, this is AMNH today. Same location, bigger, it's actually 24 complex, a campus of 24 buildings spread out on 17 acres on the Upper West Side in Manhattan. And if we fast forward to 2025, there are many things about 2025 which sound remarkably paralleled to the mid-19th century. So, we are in an era of, I would argue sort of again an inflection point in scientific discovery in terms of what we are learning about the broader universe, our understanding of biological processes that stretch from the molecular level up through the organismal and systems level. For what we know and understand about materials and the potential uses and applications and materials. Amazing discoveries going on right now. We are also at a crisis moment in terms of understanding the values of conservation. We are certainly at an inflection point in terms of the impact of climate change and the broader crisis and biodiversity loss that we're seeing around the world. And we are at an amazing point of disinformation and misinformation, where increasingly it is hard to tell what's real evidence and what's not real evidence, what's genuine authentic scientific process and what is something that's made up in another context. And so, I'd argue that the mission of the American Museum of Natural History in 2025 is equally as powerful today in terms of how can we bring scientific discovery to broader audiences? How can we make a connection between the natural world and activate people in terms of what we can do to address issues of climate change and biodiversity loss? And what we can do to counter disinformation, misinformation, build a sense of trust in institutions and in processes that help to solve problems in the world around us. So, how do we do that? So, the museum does have these three different arms, and first we wanna talk about our research. And partially because this is something that if you just come to the museum as a visitor, you might not be aware of what's going on behind the scenes on the same campus. But, at our campus in the Upper West Side, we have over 200 research scientists. We send and have collaborations that cover more than 80 global expeditions per year around the world. There are some cool specialized labs behind the scenes in our building, including a Center for Comparative Genomics and ancient biomolecules in genomics labs. So, we have facilities for extracting DNA proteins, other biomolecules from old samples and specimens so we can collect genetic information back in time in using the facilities in the museum. We have an extensive frozen tissue culture collection, including we are the national repository for tissue samples from endangered species of our national parks. And we have a full suite of things to do high resolution imaging of a wide range of different types of materials. And a lot of this is based on the fact that we have a collection of about 33 million objects and specimens that really tell the history of life on the planet. So, 33 million is a really big number. The things we actually have on display in the museum is a tiny fraction of that. In case you're wondering where the 33 million things are, they're actually, for the most part, all in those buildings on the Upper West Side. We have a few things that are in an army terminal warehouse in Brooklyn. Generally, elephants and large things are in Brooklyn. Everything else is on the Upper West Side. And of those 33 million, just as some random trivia, about four million are fish. So, we have a whole lot of fish. And we are still collecting fish at the rate of 20 to 30,000 new fish that we bring into the collection each year. Turns out there are a lot of undiscovered species of fish that we're actively characterizing. I'd say about 15 million are insects. We have a lot of insects, a million termites alone. World's largest collection of termites right here in New York. So, in addition, though, we are an educational institution, and probably one of the few educational institutions where formal education goes from preschool up through graduate education. So, we house the Richard Gilder Graduate School, which has our own PhD program and a master's program in teaching. So, we're one of the few museums independently accredited to give graduate degrees. We have graduate students who come from around the world and a faculty of about 35 tenure track positions. We also have pre-K through high school programs that are at the museum, mentored research opportunities for high school students and undergraduates, and lots and lots of field trips. So, we get about 250,000 students who come through on field trip visits each year. One of the programs that we just launched about a year ago is called BEES, the Beyond Elementary Exploration of Science. And here it's a sort of modified field trip where the idea is that a class of students from the New York public schools will be in residence at the museum for a full week. And so, these are typically fourth and fifth graders. They spend the full week, they do all of their classes at the museum, they work with museum scientists and faculty and museum educators as well as their teachers. And they have a pretty amazing experience. Many of these are students from New York who actually haven't visited the museum before. Many certainly haven't had experience in interacting with scientists before. And it's a chance to make sure that this population of students really takes ownership and can imagine themselves as going on in careers in science. And with lots of programs for research for high school students, for middle school students, and undergraduate students that exist at the museum and chances for them to present their work to the broader public. And then, you know, we're a public institution, we get about four and a half million visitors a year. That makes us one of the top visited museums in the country. Second in New York to the Met, though I actually think the Met, shes a little bit, they have two campuses that they combine into one number of the cloisters in the museum. And not that I'm competitive, but, you know, I think if we had two campuses, we would also be a little bit higher than four and a half million a year. We also do a range of public programs in terms of science lectures and talks, planetarium shows that bring in also thousands of visitors each year. And one of the things that is important is how do we use these as opportunities to introduce important conversations for civic discussion? So, for example, how do we engage in conversations about climate change, use both the research we're doing at the museum, bring that forward and bring it forward in exhibitions and in programs to stimulate conversation, discussion about things that have policy implications, but also things that have implications into decisions that people may make about their lives. And with this then that's a, you know, sort of leads me to the things that I wanna point to for the future and to kind of maybe give a bit of groundwork for some topics of conversation in that, you know, as we chart out the work of the museum for the next five to 10 years, there are four big priorities we're focused on, all of which I think fit under the umbrella of how can we bring authentic scientific processes, make them more transparent and visible to the public to help build a sense of public confidence and trust in science more broadly? More trusted institutions more broadly, and empower the public to be able to use scientific information to guide both personal and also public policy decision making. The first of these is that we're aiming to digitize and make available all 33 million objects and specimens in our collection. This is a challenge technologically, because if you think of imaging termites and imaging dinosaur bones, that you'd need different techniques and different scales. But we are developing a plan to do this. It's going to be at a pace of about two or three million objects per year over the course of the next decade. But the idea is to not only digitize and collect this information, but organize it in such a way that we can ask and answer new types of scientific questions by integrating information across disciplinary boundaries and empower the broader public to probe this database and information to ask their own questions, to be able to use the information to help cultivate a sense of scientific curiosity and the ability to explore science for anyone, without actually having to come to the museum and physically engage with the collection. Secondly, and also closely related to collections, is that we have to recognize that there are items in our collection, particularly cultural items that were collected at the museum under ethical standards which would not be acceptable today. In other words, there were folks at the museum who more or less were robbing from graves at various points in the museum's history, bringing not only cultural material to the museums, but also the ancestral remains of individuals. Also on our campus, we house the remains of about 11,000 individuals on the Upper West Side that were brought to the museum, often under the auspices of now very much debunked science, attempting to show racial hierarchies and superiority. We are aiming to, and we are engaging in a process of intentional work to proactively reach out to communities to return not only ancestors, but return funerary items and other types of cultural items that are at the museum. And to find ways to build new, different types of relationships with descendant communities which can not only, I think, help to repair the past, but also inform the ways in which we present human culture and a broader global perspective within the museum. Third is how do we make sure that all of our work touches on issues of climate change, biodiversity loss, that we bring that forward in broader conversations in our exhibition, in our education work, in our scientific research. And then finally, how do we make sure the museum is a place that's open and accessible for all? So, for New Yorkers, we are a suggested admission institution, which means that New Yorkers can come and visit for as little as a quarter. But we all know that in addition to direct financial barriers, there are other types of unseen cultural barriers that can make institutions seem like unwelcome places to members of the community that have been historically excluded. So, we are working to not only bring the museum out into communities, to take the museum's content out around the city, but to find new ways to make sure that we are welcoming. So, one of the things we've introduced in the past few weeks is a new type of membership, we call it Discover Membership. It's actually the same thing of a typical family membership one would purchase for the museum, but it's actually only open to folks who are on SNAP benefits or other indicators for the city that they are at the 120% of the poverty line. But it's a membership that's automatic. So, folks will automatically have a membership card that's the same membership card that anyone else would purchase at the museum, as well as open invitations and engagement to the community to sort of proactively reach out to communities that may not see themselves as the museum, and make sure that they are welcomed and elevated to the status of others who do actually feel like the museum has been their place. So, that's actually the work that we're doing under the sense of what's the role of a museum to counter the many trends swirling around us at this point? Actually in many ways quite parallel to the trends that were swirling around the country 150 years ago. And it's the work that's going to be important to move us forward. And so with that, hopefully that gives a bit of groundwork for both questions from you all, and I know Jim has things that he's ready to grill me on as well. So, we have a conversation.

Jim Sailer ’90 Terrific. Thank you so much, Sean. And just a reminder is if you have questions, there are people around who have index cards and pens. And try to write those questions and they'll bring them up to me. But, we'll get going. Sean and I had an opportunity to speak a couple weeks ago, which was really important because I learned that "Night at the Museum" is actually not a documentary. I had a whole set of questions about that, but it turns out, just spoiler, it's not a documentary. So, I'm gonna steer away from those questions tonight, if that's okay. Sean, one of the interesting things, I mean there's so much dynamism and change in in our country. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about how you see museum visitors and their experience changing and their expectations, and has that changed over time? And where you see that trajectory going?

Sean Decatur ’90 Yeah, and you know, it's interesting, I think there are many things about the experience at AMNH, which is a, you know, iconic historic institution, that are classic ways of presenting material that are beloved across generations. And so, the dioramas are good examples, and the fossil halls. And there is something about seeing the T-Rex and the Titanosaur and the classic, my favorite is the the brown bear diorama, North American mammals. That does just sort of strike with wonder and awe. At the same time, we also know that increasingly people use screens, and young people are often native to screens. And so, there's balance of how much of our work do we present within the museum digitally versus how much do we present in terms of physical objects is something that we are constantly tweaking. One of our newest halls that's dedicated to insects actually has a mix of screen activities and real pinned insects. It's fun to watch in that kids actually go to the real insects more than they go to the screens. And I think that that's a sign that one of the things that brings them to the museum is actually not to be on screens, to sort of do something that is a unique experience that you couldn't do at home. One final piece on this is that there's, you know, a trend that's been happening, and I think this impacts not only cultural institutions, but entertainment sites and attractions of all types is that we find increasingly now our competition isn't other forms of entertainment or cultural institutions. It's staying at home. That the biggest trend over the course of the past couple decades is the high percentage of people who report that their leisure time is spent at home doing something on the internet, streaming movies, streaming TV. And coming up with ways to bring people into the museum then is a challenge when the competition is at home. To me, part of that is the idea that you can do something in community when you come together in a place. And so, we're also just very interested, how do we make the experience of the museum something that's shared as a community experience? That is different, you know, that it's not just that you're in the planetarium, but you're in the planetarium with other people. That really matters differently than doing something at home.

Jim Sailer ’90 And so, you mentioned technology a a little bit. Maybe you could talk about artificial intelligence and how you're thinking about that in terms of both the experience of the user and the experience of managing this institution.

Sean Decatur ’90 Yeah, well and one of the things that I think that is exciting about doing, launching the effort to do major digitization of natural history collections at this point is the ways in which artificial intelligence helps to both make the process itself a little bit easier, but then how it will help us to creatively integrate and explore this. If we think of, in a sense a museum collection is a large, multidimensional database. And we have the physical object, we have the metadata that goes with the object, that can include things like not only where it was collected and when it was collected, but the air temperature, the water temperature, sort of that type of information. And then we have things like genomic information, chemical analysis, things that we can collect about the specimen now. And we want all of that, and we want all of that integrated in such a way that not only is it searchable, but we can find connections. And so, for example, is there changes due to climate change on Pacific Islands in the South Pacific that we can go into our collection and search to find how particular species may have been impacted over time, what the temperatures were in the place that they were over time, how the physical appearance connects to the genomic information, and how that's changed over time. And then maybe actually how things like the coral and the other types of physical specimens that compliment the biological specimens that are there. The integration of all that information is going to be rapidly accelerated by using AI databases that can help to integrate things that would be hard to do otherwise. I'll say it makes me nervous at the same time in the sense that I also believe in making things openly available, and that's the way to power science forward. I think the changes in the way AI companies approach freely available databases to use for their own purposes makes me nervous, as someone who does that. And I think that's going to be an area for us to explore and figure out as we look forward.

Jim Sailer ’90 Thank you. Big surprise, a lot of Swarthmore people have questions and comments for you. Question here about, there's a specific question but it leads to a larger one, which is, the specific question is what are the best ways to engage people with a ninth grade education in the discussion about climate change? And maybe there's a larger question about how you see the role of the museum as scientists who want to presumably address and discuss that versus moving over into advocacy around that, and what lines and barriers you see between those.

Sean Decatur ’90 Yeah, and you know, education around climate change is hard. And, you know, it's hard for multiple reasons. I think when we think of young people in particular, there's a lot of research that shows that young people are very aware and quite anxious about the impact of climate change on their lives. And, you know, perhaps for very good reasons. So, that's understandable anxiety. But the impact on mental health and the ability then to take in information is also impeded by that, right? So, we have to find a way to communicate honestly, but communicate honestly in a way that's not just going to elevate the level of anxiety and response that people have. So, that's one type of concern. A second is that it's easy to not necessarily dismiss, but to ignore things that feel distant and far away, much harder to ignore the things that feel immediate. So, one of our challenges is how do we make, build the connection between what's a global phenomenon and a global impact to something that's really quite local and specific. And a third is that there's also a lot of evidence that people turn off to just purely negative messages. And in fact, AMNH had an early museum, an early exhibit on climate change about 25 years ago that proved to be incredibly unpopular in terms of visitation. And some of that is that the big kind of highlight was a diorama of a polar bear alone on an ice float with like plastic floating around, right? And that was the thing that was used in the publicity materials, and it was kind of the opening thing that you came in. And not surprisingly, it did not bring in a huge crowd of people to come. So, again, we don't want to be dishonest, but we also can't lead with things that are going to just turn people off and not bring them in. So, we're trying to experiment with all of these things. So, how can we tell local stories that connect to the global? Because people can find a way to see how it impacts their lives. How can we connect those local stories to things that you can do? So, it's not just a local story, but here's something that you can do that empowers people, which helps to counter that sense of anxiety. And so, finding that balance of what's the right set of tools to have is something that we're actively working on.

Jim Sailer ’90 Sean, we've had three, at least three separate questions that people are raised about funding. As everyone knows, funding for science, you know, including at the institution that I lead, has been cut in various ways. And people are curious about how your museum is funded and whether you have faced, the museum has faced cuts in the wake of this administration.

Sean Decatur ’90 Yeah, so we receive federal funding, I think, probably from just about every agency you've heard about in the news being cut. We probably have a grant from that agency. So, we have, on the culture end of things, I have to be careful on past tense and present tense. In some case, it's clearly that we had funding from NEA and NEH. We also receive historically funding from the National Science Foundation. NOAA, NASA, we used to have funding from USAID that supported some of our global conservation efforts and connecting our science to the global conservation work there. We had funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services. That was gutted and our grants were canceled, but then there's pending litigation, so our grants were then turned back on again. But it's unclear how long those grants are going to be functioning. And we've had, from all of these agencies, individual grants canceled, sometimes with patterns that are clear. So, some of the work that we do to expand opportunity and access to groups that have been historically excluded from full participation in science. So, for example, an NSF grant that supports the high school teachers to be better mentors for scientific research who come from public underserved high schools. That grant was terminated. We had threats to grants of NASA. So, our NASA grants haven't been canceled yet, but they're the programs that support the public communication of NASA science are on the chopping block in the current budget under consideration. And so, that's actually, our work in the planetarium has really been a long-term partnership between our scientists and NASA. And that's something that's unclear how we move forward. I'd say the biggest challenge right now, in addition to the actual lost dollars, it's just the uncertainty. That it really is a world where grants are canceled one day, they're turned back on a few days later, and paused a few days after that. And as many of you know, grants are tied to people, and people who are working on those projects. So, how do we support and sustain the work of people through this? And in this climate, it's also, I think, important to point out that we are an international museum in terms of scientists and graduate students who come to us. So, some of the folks who are working on projects are on visas, and so they are also very anxious about their own status here in the country. And of course, if the grant that pays them is terminated, that puts their visa status even more at risk. And so, we're trying to balance all of those things right now. And I wish I had a good answer for how we are going to do it, except yeah, we're trying to navigate through all of this.

Jim Sailer ’90 When you get the answer, please let me know.

Sean Decatur ’90 Yes.

Jim Sailer ’90 I appreciate that. Couple questions about specific comments you made in your opening remarks, Sean. And this is that you joked about the MET being competition. I think it was a joke. What kind of competition or cooperation do you have with other museums, including thinking about not just New York City, but the Smithsonians? And has the new administration, has there been changed any of this for you?

Sean Decatur ’90 Yeah. And there is, I'd say actually there's great cooperation among the cultural institutions in New York. You know, we deal on the one hand, obviously we all want to attract visitors to ourselves, but I think there's also an understanding that the cultural landscape in New York is rich and strong because of the diversity of institutions that are there. So, there's really great cooperation there. Nationally and internationally, there's a group of natural history museums that work really quite closely, and it includes the largest museums in North America and the largest museums in Western Europe. I will embarrassingly say that we give ourselves the incredibly pretentious name of the G-13, and there is collaboration among us, for example, on this effort to digitize collections. Because combined across the major natural history museums, we have about a billion specimens in our collections. We're all working on sort of cataloging and digitizing, and it's important that we do it in ways that will actually talk to each other. And so, we're collaborating really quite closely to make that happen. You know, there's also just a lot of conversation. We share information all the time about trying to navigate through the current environment. So, it's great to have friends and peers to work on when there's so much uncertainty, to work with when there's so much uncertainty.

Jim Sailer ’90 Great. Thank you. You also mentioned about the, it sounds like a fantastic idea, this kind of membership card program. Do you have any data about how that's actually affected the experience or the attendance for low income families to come to the museum?

Sean Decatur ’90 And this is brand new, so this is about three weeks old. So we will, we'll hopefully know more. We're doing a big press of publicity as we go into the summer season and as folks are off from school. And so, you know, we'll know more in a few months.

Jim Sailer ’90 Great. So, you've touched on the issue of, you know, your public role in a number of ways. And there's a thoughtful question here about how do you build trust in science. Another question about why is there so much anti-science feeling in this country right now? And how do you build trust in science while communicating better about the uncertainties in science? 'cause we all, I mean, we all see out there online, somebody says, well, so and so was wrong about this, so you can't trust anything they, you know, they were wrong about X, Y, or Z in science. And that happens sometimes, right? We learn and we grow. And how do you think about that kind of communication in this strange environment we're in, in which now science is a political issue and not just a scientific one?

Sean Decatur ’90 Yeah, and maybe I'll pull back to slightly bigger picture for a second and just think about the ways in which we use the word science. Because we, I think within the scientific community, but I think we sort of America more broadly often use the word science to mean at least three different things. One is the scientific information itself. So, like a collection of facts and knowledge. We will sometimes say the science, and we mean like the body of facts, knowledge. Sometimes we refer to, and actually this is the definition I think is most important, which is science as a process, as a way of understanding the world, sort of the epistemological view of science. And sometimes I think we refer to science as a collection of institutions and individuals. And we saw this a lot during the pandemic where the concept of believe the science really morphed into believe the science as an set of institutions and as a set of people who became the representatives of that. Now, the problem of using these interchangeably is that people really distrust institutions. Like, and that's all of the studies have shown that right now, you know, it doesn't really matter what kind of institution, American confidence in institutions of any type and of people of authority of any type is been declining and is is continuing to decline. So, when we say like, believe the science and we associate science with whether it is Tony Fauci or whether it's the NIH or something, and we put a person in an institution, we're kind of aligning it to a beliefs. Or asking for trust that's automatically questionable. When we conflate science with just the facts, the body of knowledge, that also something gets into what you're referring to, that like those body, that knowledge changes over time, right? And so, again, we tell people that sort of what you need to trust is like science, and it's this collection of facts as the science. Yeah, you do run into a problem when that collection of facts is going to be different, and we know it's going to be different because that's how science works. So, to me, the key is to emphasize that science is a process, it's a way of understanding the world. It's a way of predictably solving problems and predicting phenomenon that will happen. And it's a way of taking a collection of evidence and drawing conclusions from that part of evidence. You know, there was a study from Pew that I find striking in that sort of trying to probe this question of why people don't trust science. And one of the things that stood out to me is that when you ask, when they were asking in the survey, do scientists change their opinions in the face of changing evidence? The majority of people said no, that scientists don't change their views in the face of changing evidence. Which to those of us who are practicing scientists and believe in science as a process, is the exact opposite of what science is, right? That science is you collect evidence, you draw conclusions from that, you get new evidence that changes, and you get new conclusions. So, that there is a sense somehow that science is this dogmatic holding on to a set of ideas, and science isn't a response to observation and evidence. And so, when I think about the role of the museum, the role of the museum has to be to open up some windows into how the scientific process works. And I think our best exhibits are places where the emphasis of the text and what we're trying to tell as a story of the exhibit is telling of the process and not necessarily telling the actual answer. And I find this even in some of our fossil halls, which are places that you might think are just traditional and you go to the text and you'll find like, you know, how big the tail of the dinosaur is or something like that. The way the exhibits are structured actually are about how was this specimen found? What did we learn from it? How do we know the tail is this long? Why does it put together in this way? That sort of lead people through the questions of how you go from discovery to understanding what the evidence is to how you understand what the conclusions are. And what I think is most important, like what I really want people to take away from the museum and any exhibit that they see is just a bit of an understanding of that process, that they know that not necessarily they remember what the random facts are, the random trivia may be, but that they kind of remember something about, you know, we know the ants behave this way because this is what we observe, right? And that that process matters. And the more we can drive that home, the more I think that begins to rebuild the sense of trust and confidence in science.

Jim Sailer ’90 Great. Couple more questions. One is, how has the AMNH staff changed recently? Or has it changed recently to help bring about the increased public engagement that you're seeking?

Sean Decatur ’90 Yeah. And, do you know the staff kind of continues, you know, and I think that Canadian institution continues to evolve. I mean, we are looking to strengthen the sort of staff who are sort of charged specifically with working out in communities and doing work that takes the museum outward, beyond the walls of the museum out into communities. I think another piece that's changed over time is as we think of our anthropological work, having staff that are seeking to build partnership and proactively going out and listening to communities, I'd say especially indigenous North American communities, other communities where we have material at the museum, it's a different type of approach and skillset to find folks who are really charged with doing that bridge-building, partnership-building as a central part of the work that we have moving ahead. And that's like a key piece that we do, though I'd say generally the most important thing about what we do for both recruiting staff to the museum, and I think the thing that most people have in common is just a sense of like awe and wonder of how cool the place is and what that means about how interesting and fascinating the world is. And I was telling someone earlier that I still find, you know, I've now been at the museum for two years, and when I come in in the mornings, I come in before the museum is officially open, and I get to walk through the halls. And there's no one else in the halls and you have the museum to yourself, it is still to me like the coolest thing ever to do. And when I talk to my colleagues and it doesn't--

Jim Sailer ’90 Are the horses still running around then? Or do they stop?

Sean Decatur ’90 No, the sun is up, so we're kind of, we're talking the same.

Jim Sailer ’90 Oh, right, right.

Sean Decatur ’90 But when I talk to staff, and it's true of like our, you know, our security team, our custodial team, our curators, like, they all have that sense. Like I can talk to any of the floor staff and ask them, it's like they'll just say, this is really cool. Like, I get to get to be around like a T-Rex for a good part of the day. And that because, and the more we can have that excitement, I think that's part of what people feed off of, right? In terms of excitement about the work.

Jim Sailer ’90 Great. I have a couple personal questions about you and your experience with this. With a few minutes left. The first is, how has your experience going to other museums been changed by the fact that you now run this museum? You're a consumer and a, you know, of other museums. Has your experience changed? Do you look for different things? Do you notice different things? How has that changed since you've had this job?

Sean Decatur ’90 Yeah, I definitely now go to the museum as the, you know, basically looking to steal really interesting ideas. Regardless of what museum I'm at. And it can range like from different ways of presenting multimedia things to, you know, I visited the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa recently, which has actually one of the neatest applications of VR I've seen where you put on goggles and a headset and you sit in a special chair and you experience the Dust Bowl. And I immediately kind of came back and said, oh, we've gotta figure out how to do this. And then someone pointed out that yes, we need to do it with like 10,000 people a day coming through. So, one set of goggles in a chair, like? It won't actually work. It's like, yeah, the Woody Guthrie Center is much smaller. But yes, I mean I think I definitely go through now trying to find interesting ideas and things that we can take back.

Jim Sailer ’90 Great. How did your Swarthmore experience prepare you for the role? And what could Swarthmore have done better to do better, to better prepare you for this role?

Sean Decatur ’90 And I think probably the most important thing my Swarthmore experience did was that sense of ability to look broadly and to think broadly at issues. To sort of take in bigger picture, take in a lot of different types of information. And I'd say a fearlessness about studying things that you may not know a lot about to begin with, but you know, that sense that you can figure it out if you have enough information and spend enough time in Cornell, that you can sort of eventually figure out what you're doing. And to me, the, this trajectory, this part of my career just underscores the importance of fundamental liberal arts education, right? Because, you know, I spent my graduate work as a, you know, as studying protein structure and folding. It does have a little bit to do with dinosaurs, but not as much as one might think. And certainly has not as much to do with issues of, you know, how do you navigate repatriation? How do you think about the implication of repatriation to indigenous populations of countries which have a different, a government from a different cultural group. And balancing the diplomatic work that you have to do with the ethical work of reaching descendant families. Not something that my, like biochemistry background prepared me for, but my broad sense of Swarthmore education and the value of knowing that being around smart people and the way you can learn from smart people and ask questions of peers and others, like all of that has completely shaped and informed all of the work I've done.

Jim Sailer ’90 Wonderful. So, I'm gonna end with a comment from a member of the audience on this card. And then I'm gonna give you the card because this is a fantastic comment and you can take this home with you. But before I do that, I just want to say, again, thank you all for coming to this great event. Thank you, Sean, for being here. And as you walk around the campus this weekend and interact with people, there is a, you know, some people who I encourage you to thank and recognize, and that's the staff of the college who are working 12 and 14 and sometimes longer hour days to bring us fantastic events like here. There might be six or eight people who behind the scenes are working to make sure the sound is right and the video is right and that we had water and that the prep room was set up well and things like that. But there are all kinds of people who are spending the entire weekend to make sure all of you have a great experience. And they're really going out of their way to do that. And I hope you find a way of recognizing all those people when you interact with them. It's a great set. And the college has done a wonderful job for us. I'll just remind you for this talk that this is a SwatTalk, it's brought to you by Alumni Council, which is your, you know, the alumni association and the leadership of the alumni association for the college. And if you see people around from Alumni Council, we encourage you to talk to me or others about it. And there's information on the website, and you'll hear a little bit more about it tomorrow at collection, which will be, I think, held here. But the thing, the present you get is the comment from Kay Goddesman, class of 1960. And this is what Kay wrote. Kay wrote, "I grew up three blocks from the museum "and I spent many hours there. "This sparked my interest in animals "and I knew I wanted to study biology." So, when you're having a bad day, and they come, and things aren't going your way, I want you to pull this out of your desk, and it's gonna make you feel better.

Sean Decatur ’90 Thank you.

Jim Sailer ’90 Ladies and gentlemen, Sean Decatur.

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