San Diego

The board of trustees at a leading museum in the western United States has resigned, following an outcry over the sale of some of its collection to help cover operating costs.

The Museum of Northern Arizona (MNA) in Flagstaff, best known for its archaeology and palaeontology collections, will hold a meeting of its supporters on 26 July to elect new trustees to try to end what local scientists describe as a year of financial and administrative turmoil at the museum.

On 11 July, the museum's trustees and its director, Robert Baughman, said they would resign with effect from 26 July, after leading donors and museum supporters set up a petition to force them out.

Baughman and the trustees declined to comment on the resignations, but a museum statement said that they were intended “to restore confidence in the institution”.

Over 75 years, the museum has curated one of the nation's leading collections of Native American artefacts and art, together with dinosaur and geological specimens.

But along with many other US museums, the MNA has been going through tough financial times (see Nature 423, 575; 200310.1038/423575a). Early last year, when it was running out of operating funds, the museum's leadership made the decision to declare some pieces of the art and archaeology collection 'non-performing assets' and sell them for about $850,000 to a private dealer.

Among the items sold were half a dozen sandpainting textiles by Hosteen Klah, an esteemed ceremonial practitioner in the Navajo tribe who died in 1937. “This never should have happened,” says Susan Brown McGreevy, an authority on Klah's work and former director of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “It was an act of total irresponsibility.”

When details of the sale became known earlier this year, a museum donor, Cynthia Perin, filed a complaint with the American Association of Museums (AAM). Perin says that the AAM has opened an investigation, as its ethics code forbids the sale of part of the collection to generate operating revenue. Perin says she is “appalled” by the museum's actions, including the scaling-back of its geology department.

AAM-accredited museums, such as the MNA, should not consider their collections as assets, says Ed Able, the AAM's president. Able declined to confirm that an investigation was under way, but says that he has never known a museum board to resign en masse.