The move was widely interpreted as a behind-the-scenes attempt by Menino to exert greater control over the library, by stacking the board with cronies who would fulfill his demands. Of course, the point of the library trustees is that, while they are appointed by the mayor, they are intended to serve the public.
That is one of the reasons that the 1878 statute establishing the board keeps too much power over the library from being concentrated in single hands: the mayor appoints the trustees, the trustees hire the library chief, and the City Council sets the salary. This provides a countervailing power to the mayor. By law, the head of the library is responsible to the trustees. But Menino, a skillful operator, has managed to transform the board into a troupe of puppets.
It will be interesting to see how the puppets perform when called upon to select a new president of the library, perhaps as soon as this Monday. A blue-ribbon search committee chaired by retired Harvard Business School dean John MacArthur is said to have assembled a list of candidates that includes the heads of five big-city libraries and former State Senate president Thomas Birmingham.
Those unfamiliar with the politics that now engulf the library may have been surprised to see Birmingham’s name in contention. But it has long been rumored that Menino, a past political ally, and Rudman, a friend, wanted him for the job. And it is no surprise that the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Birmingham, said to be bored with the practice of law, would welcome the opportunity to command what is one of the jewels of Boston’s rich cultural treasure.
Another former State Senate president, William Bulger, a politically conservative and perennially controversial figure, confounded naysayers during his tenure as president of the University of Massachusetts, by leading that institution with vigor and distinction. Bulger drew applause from students, faculty, staff, alumni, and corporate givers. His splendid tenure was sacrificed on the altar of former governor Mitt Romney’s now-failed presidential hopes. Romney traded Bulger’s record for cheap and fleeting headlines.
If Boston needs a politically minded library chief, and we’re not sure that it does, why look to the admirable Birmingham? Why not tap Bulger, who, as a library trustee and as Senate president, helped lay the foundation for the renewal of the Boston Public Library that Margolis so skillfully superintended? Former library trustee and Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough suggested that very thing in a private letter to Menino. But Bulger, who has quietly left the board, is too independent a mind for the mayor.
If Birmingham does get the job (and the compromised trustees have the grace and good sense to abstain from the coming vote on the new library president), he will be getting it under a cloud. If he does not, he has needlessly been subjected to the taunts of the likes of Howie Carr.
It is time for someone — perhaps the City Council and certainly attorney general Coakley — to ask: is this any way to run a library?
