When I was a kid my mom signed me up for a couple of Saturday classes at the Smithsonian Institution.  One was a photography class where we made our own pinhole cameras and then traipsed around the Hirshhorn Gallery taking our pictures and then developing them ourselves in a darkroom.  The other was a nature drawing class that taught me how to draw a beaver that looked suspiciously like an elephant (I’ve always preferred the abstract).  The Smithsonian was also the destination for countless school field trips and excursions when friends or family visited from out of town, all for free.  Well the classes weren’t free, but the excursions were.

Now it looks like the guy running the show for the last several years, Lawrence Small, tried his best to ruin the free museum party for everyone (Source: Washington Post).  To wit:

Former Smithsonian secretary Lawrence M. Small took nearly 10 weeks
of vacation a year during seven years running the vast museum complex
and was absent from his job 400 workdays while earning $5.7 million on
outside work, according to an independent commission report to be
released today.

The Smithsonian’s second-ranking official, Sheila
P. Burke, was absent from her job as deputy secretary for 550 days
while earning $10 million over six years on non-museum work…

Small, while taking substantial time off, earned his full salary —
$915,568 his last year on the job — because he was permitted unlimited
leave. Burke, who also had no restrictions on leave, earned $400,000 in
her last year on the job. The terms of Burke’s employment were known in
most instances only to Small and Burke. Information about Burke’s
outside employment and activities on more than a dozen nonprofit boards
and commissions was not shared with the Board of Regents, the report
found.

Small resigned in March and Burke announced her resignation on Monday on the eve of the independent review report.

The
investigators found that "Mr. Small placed too much emphasis on his
compensation and expenses." Small’s compensation far exceeded that of
prior Smithsonian secretaries — 42 percent higher than his
predecessor’s when he began in 2000 and 250 percent higher when he left
seven years later.

Small "aggressively guarded each and every
element of what he viewed as his rightful compensation package,"
including his $150,000-a-year housing allowance. Small’s contract
stated that the allowance was meant to compensate Small for his use of
his home for job-related entertainment, but the review board determined
that it was "simply additional salary."

The Post article goes on to point out that Small’s exhorbidant salary was justified by his stellar fundraising, but the report actually shows that yearly fundraising had fallen during his tenure and some of the biggest fish he was credited with landing were actually landed by his predecessor.  In other words the guy was an overrated bum, and I’m willing to bet all those members of the Smithsonian Associates program are a bit peeved right about now.