By VANESSA LANGDON
News Editor
Saint Rose music professor Bruce Roter has been planning a political corruption museum for some time and hopes to use the ever-present corruption in Albany politics as a revenue maker for the City.
Roter is in the planning stages for the museum after conceiving the idea a handful of years ago over coffee with the current Albany Mayor, Kathy Sheehan.
“What do we have here that we could lighten up about?” mused Roter on that day. “We can’t run away from it. We might as well use it, harness it as a resource, and package it up.”
Since that day, Roter has assembled a Board of Trustees and is working on raising the necessary revenue to make the museum come to life in downtown Albany, a stone’s throw from the capital building. He hopes that the proximity to the capital building will allow state legislators to visit the museum on their lunch hours.
“We hope they won’t be turned off the by premise of a museum of political corruption, because we don’t want this museum to demonize any particular politician. If anything, we’re trying to humanize the entire process,” said Roter. “Corruption is a human foible and we want to underscore the temptations and the traps that legislators can easily fall into when they come to Albany.”
Included in the trustees working on that mission are experts in the museum field and politics. While the intial idea was his, Roter plans on leaving details regarding the exhibitions to the experts.
One member of the Board of Trustees, Frank Anechiarico, heard about the Museum of Political Corruption through Saint Rose political science professor Angela Ledford. Since hearing about the “innovative” idea for the museum a year ago, he has been an active member of the trustee committee, planning the content of the museum.
He believes that the museum will be very important for Albany’s future, “when you consider the number of prosecutions and convictions for corrupt activity by member[s] of the state legislature,” Anechiarico said.
Anechiarico believes that Roter’s museum is needed to spread the word about a serious problem facing Capital Region politics and to discuss the possible solutions.
“Bruce is wonderful. He has boundless and infectious enthusiasm for this project. Without him, none of this would have happened,” Anechiarico said.
Anechiarico is the Maynard-Knox Professor of Government and Law at Hamilton College and a member of the graduate faculty at the City University of New York. He brings his expertise in the area of public integrity to the project.
Fellow board member Donna Kuba has more than 30 years’ experience directing and managing museum exhibits. She heard of the Museum of Political Corruption while searching for new museum projects to work on.
“In the course of a search about two years ago, I saw an article online regarding a potential new museum in Albany. Because my hometown is Schenectady, I have a specific interest in that area,” Kuba said.
It was Roter’s personality that prompted Kuba to get involved.
“Bruce’s passion for the idea, and his desire to make it work, convinced me that this was something with which I wanted to be involved, so I volunteered to answer any questions I could about the design and fabrication of a museum and its exhibitions – my field since 1972 – and soon we were corresponding fairly regularly, getting to know each other in the process,” she said.
Kuba’s initial reaction, however, was a laughing matter.
“First I laughed so hard, I cried and then I ran around my office assailing my friends and coworkers with the article. I thought it was brilliant. Once I had contacted Bruce, I knew it was brilliant,” Kuba said.
Included in the Board of Advisors is Zephyr Teachout, an associate professor of law at Fordham University, former gubernatorial candidate Susan Rose-Ackerman of Yale Law School and Department of Political Science, and Katherine Burton-Jones, the director of museum studies at the Harvard Extension School.
The team is working hard on the concept museum.
“The ‘idea’ of political corruption is many-faceted and it will be a challenge to deliver the content in a cogent and compelling manner. Treating such a serious subject, with all its attendant pitfalls, with tongue-in-cheek humor, as Bruce has proposed, is what I find most original and intriguing,” Kuba said.
The plans include such exhibitions as a Hall of Shame with its counterpart the Hall of Honor, a Lobbyists Lobby, Tammany Lecture Hall, Hall of Campaign Finance Reform, Hall of Graft, Bribery, and Kickbacks, an Obstruction of Justice hall, which will be a maze, and a cozy crony café.
“I am hoping the political advisors can come up with some tale of corruption that can be translated into a wickedly decadent chocolate dessert to be served in the Cozy Crony’s Café, where the menu items will named to recall famous – or infamous – corruption stories,” Kuba said.
The admission to the museum is also advertised a “bribe.” The adult bribe is $12.50 and the children’s bribe is $6.50.
“The museum’s strategy is to approach the subject with wit and intelligence as a method to pique curiosity and maintain interest. Ideally, it will reveal the workings of corruption and, through those revelations, propose cures,” said Kuba. “The experience will be interactive and educational but, more important, will suggest there are positive solutions and create an on-going mission for its visitors.”
In short order Roter and his team have secured the museum a provisional charter with the State of New York and status as a non-profit organization.
“The process to create the Museum of Political Corruption will include, among myriad other tasks, finding a suitable location; stages of master planning, research, and content development; artifact collection; exhibit and media design; fund raising; and final production. And all that has to happen before the doors can be opened and the museum begins its true function,” Kuba said.
Roter hopes to have the museum open to the public by 2019. Even after the museum is up and running, he plans on continuing his work at the College.
“Perhaps when I retire someday I’ll be the old man running the cash register,” he said.
Roter believes that his role in the museum, as founder and president, is to select the best team possible for the job and has found the process of finding those people to be very exciting as he uses his musical background.
“I’m not a museum expert at all, but I’m a fairly good orchestrator,” said Roter. “I know how they should all harmonize together, that’s what I seem to be doing.”
Donations can be made to the museum creation on their website, museumofpoliticalcorruption.org, and the museum does currently have an online museum store selling buttons, hats, shirt and mugs emblazoned with their logo.
“I think I’ve been interested in politics for a long time,” Roter said.
He has written pieces of music based on the writings of Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States and former Governor of New York, as well as an orchestral piece called the “Camp David Overture,” based on the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt, which has now been performed across the country.
He believes that he picked up his penchant for the tongue-in-cheek, irreverent political commentary while living in Portland, Oregon before coming to Albany 18 years ago.
As a music professor and not a politician creating the museum, Roter wants it to have lots of student energy and creativity involved in the creation and planning because at heart he is an educator.
This educational pursuit will be continued Tuesday, Dec. 15, as Roter travels to Cooperstown to pick up a report from the Cooperstown graduate program in Museum Studies. The program identified the museum as an emerging institution and assembled a group to study the project and make recommendations on what they should be doing.
“I work on this in between the cracks, late at night and early in the morning. It’s a project if interest and passion for me that I hope will ultimately benefit the community, College and students,” said Roter. “Let’s be known for promoting ethical governance.”
