The Harvard Program for Art Museum Directors, a yearlong program designed to introduce recently appointed art museum directors to current thinking about matters of leadership, management, and the latest trends in university-based art history teaching and research, was recently created by the University Art Museums.

"This is a very exciting opportunity for our profession," Art Museums Director James Cuno said in announcing the program. "Our country's art museums are under tremendous pressure socially, financially, and artistically. And all too rarely do we directors get a chance to meet together in small groups and in the company of leading scholars to discuss ways to deal with these pressures."

Cuno said the program's aims include encouraging leadership in the field and to both equip art museum directors with the skills needed to meet today's challenges and inspire them to assume positions of leadership within the profession. "Of course the latter is not easy," Cuno admitted. "But at a time when art itself is being attacked as extraneous to the life of our nation, something has to be done. We need to develop strong voices in favor of art and strong leaders to direct our art museums."

Recently appointed directors invited to participate in this year's program include Susana Leval of the El Museo del Barrio, New York; Timothy Rub of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth; Emily Sano of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; and Gary Vikan of the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. In addition, four more senior directors have also been invited to participate. These include Glenn Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kinshasha Conwill of the Studio Museum, Harlem; Mimi Gardner Gates of the Seattle Art Museum; and Peter Marzio of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. James Cuno and James N. Wood, president of The Art Institute of Chicago, will serve as co-chairs of the program.

The directors will meet three times at Harvard over the course of the academic year. At each meeting, faculty from two or more of the University professional schools as well as from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will lead seminars. The fall session, held last month, focused on leadership and decision making and included such seminars as "The Anatomy of Public Leadership," led by professor Howard Gardner, School of Education; "Whom Do We Serve?: Principal-Agent Theory," led by Professor Richard Zeckhauser, Kennedy School of Government; "The Politics of Culture," led by professor Nathan Glazer; "Public Management," led by Professor Mark Moore, Kennedy School of Government; and "Leadership Without Easy Answers," led by Professor Ronald Heifetz, Kennedy School of Government.

Future sessions will take place in the spring and early summer. In session two the Fellows will complete the Harvard Business School's program, Strategic Perspectives for Non-Profit Management. In this session the Fellows will be joined by the CEO's of a wide variety of not-for-profit institutions, as well as the chairpersons of each Fellow's board. The final four-day session in the spring of 1998 is comprised of a rigorous agenda of seminars with selected faculty members chosen to build on the experiences of sessions one and two. The three sessions are deliberately spaced throughout the year to allow participants to apply principles learned within their home institutions and return to the group for feed-back and follow-up.

The directors program was developed over the past three years by James Cuno and James Wood, along with a board of advisers comprised of art museum directors and trustees from across the country. The advisory board includes John D. Nichols of Illinois Toolworks, Bruce B. Dayton of Minnesota; Richard Koshalek, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art; Katherine C. Lee, director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and James Wood.