ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 27, 1995 TAG: 9512270122
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
WHEN A few parents protested Salvador Dali's depiction of the subconscious in a children's exhibit at the Art Museum of Western Virginia recently, museum officials quietly and respectfully . . . made no changes in their plans.
In some institutions in the nation's capital, alas, backbones are more in evidence in uncontroversial dinosaur displays than in the people in charge.
Take the Library of Congress. It recently dismantled a planned display on slavery after some black staff members took offense. Before that, it put off an exhibit about Sigmund Freud after academics complained that his theories have been discredited.
The traveling slavery exhibit depicts plantation life in photographs and interviews with former slaves from the Depression-era federal writers project. One would hope such an exhibit would be troubling. Slavery is a fact of our history that needs to be confronted.
Indeed, confronting our past, using the changing and imperfect judgments of scholars, is one of museums' most important missions. When he dedicated the site of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, President Reagan said: "We must make sure that from now until the end of days, all humankind stares this evil in the face."
Speaking of staring evil in the face, Freud likely will be remembered centuries from now as one of the great pioneers of human thought, a courageous if complex soul who stared into, and tried to sort out, human irrationality.
Many of the critics who signed a petition against the Freud exhibit doubtless belong to what Yale professor Harold Bloom has dubbed "the School of Resentment." We have concerns about this school's position in academia, but we'd rather expose students to it than close down institutions. After all, as Freud observed, it is healthier to expose and sift through than to suppress.
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