To the editor:

The selective memory of the Lawrence Journal-World never ceases to amaze me. Your recent coverage of the Commons seemed to suggest that this use of Spooner Hall for cross-disciplinary explorations and community outreach was innovative. However, I would like to point out that the first such use of the space was put into play in 2000, when it was still the Museum of Anthropology.

In that year, the museum, in conjunction with researchers, scholars, artists and students from the university, the larger Lawrence community and beyond, sponsored a series of exhibitions, lectures and performances celebrating the role of women in creating and sustaining cultures around the world. The exhibit, “Women’s Works 2000,” was supported by the Kansas Humanities Council and was cited in the annual publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities as one of the important projects funded at the state level in that year.

Among the presenters were two MacArthur Fellows who were sponsored in part by the greater Kansas City Jewish community. Many of us who were involved with the project felt deeply this was the direction in which the Museum of Anthropology should go. How wrong we were.

Although the Hall Center for the Humanities independently supported the project, the administration of the university was strikingly absent from the majority of the events associated with it and, in the end, rewarded the forward thinking of the people who worked so hard on the exhibition by closing the Museum of Anthropology.

Sandra Gray,

KU associate professor of anthropology