Dear Dr. Tisa Mason,
I am writing you again as a Fort Hays alumnus ('93 BS & '94 MS - geology), a current adjunct curator of the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, a scholar, an educator, and a “west-central Kansan” at heart, to follow up with my letter sent to you on September 30, 2026 (posted on October 2: https://hayspost.com/posts/d21f9810-f414-43e6-abbd-a00b7996044b).
I observed your budget testimony before the Kansas Legislative Budget Committee through a live stream with great interest. Thank you for your new commitment to keep the museum open by shifting from your single-handed “Sternberg 2.0” to a community-based 'Sternberg Funding Model 2.0,' which should also actively involve your very own Sternberg Museum staff and experts in various decision-making processes.
I am also very encouraged by the budget committee’s overall support moving forward, and I sincerely thank the committee members for their understanding that Kansas cannot afford to lose the Sternberg Museum.
For example, Tripadvisor lists the Sternberg Museum as Hays' top attraction, as of today: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g38771-Activities-Hays_Kansas.html.
I am writing you again because I would like to point out two of your misconceptions that were illuminated by your testimony, along with requesting clarification.
The first misconception is simple. Contrary to your doubts, the Sternberg Museum does bring students to FHSU from both inside and outside the state (even international students!), most notably to the Geosciences Department. Case in point, I chose FHSU for college and my master’s program because of the Sternberg Museum! I am not alone, and in fact, it is no exaggeration that practically all my fellow FHSU graduates and I, who remain active in paleontology (i.e., the scientific study of prehistoric life; not to be confused with archaeology, which focuses on ancient human cultures), would not have succeeded in the field without the Sternberg Museum.
It was clear to me through your budget testimony that you have been considering FHSU and the museum as two completely separate entities, even questioning the Sternberg’s merit to FHSU and its students. Please be aware that this is far from the truth.
The fact is that, at least in paleontology, FHSU is known globally because of the Sternberg, and FHSU attracts students because of the Sternberg.
Your second misconception is your view of Sternberg’s scientific specimens, which you described as “cultural arts” in your testimony, if I heard correctly. This seems to explain where your terrifying idea of potentially selling Sternberg’s specimens using a foreign antiquity commercial dealer is coming from, which you have simply put on ‘pause.’
Please let me be clear. Unless it is found in archaeological context (which is very rare), scientific specimens in natural history museums held in public trust globally may be aesthetically beautiful (or not) but are decisively NOT objects of “cultural arts,” as I explained in the following article with my colleagues, using fossil specimens as an example:
For your information, at the end of this message (“Example 1” and “Example 2”) showcases two specific scientific specimens from west-central Kansas in the Sternberg Museum based on my research to demonstrate that: 1) every scientific specimen in the Sternberg collections represents natural heritage (rather than cultural heritage) and has a unique history with complex human dimensions that are rarely obvious, and 2) why scientific specimens do not function in the same way as art objects.
As I noted in my Sept.30 letter to you, every specimen in the museum’s permanent collections was carefully vetted and curated by past and present museum curators to be scientifically significant, worth saving for Kansans and the global scientific community in perpetuity.
FHSU must assume that every student and expert who has visited the Sternberg’s collections could have collected data from any of the specimens they examined, regardless of whether published or yet-to-be-published, and every specimen in the permanent collections offers opportunities for other investigators and future generations of scientists (including present and future FHSU students!) to address new scientific questions and make new discoveries. Hence, again, there are no ‘dispensable specimens’ in the permanent collections at the Sternberg Museum.
In fact, this applies to every public natural history museum across the globe, which is understood to be the very function of ‘specimen repositories.’ FHSU has the obligation and responsibility to maintain the entire Sternberg’s permanent collections intact in the current building and accessible in perpetuity to the international scientific community.
Besides your ‘painful backstabbing’ to me noted in my previous letter, the fact that you have simply put ‘pause’ on the idea of potentially liquidating the museum’s permanent collections is incredibly disheartening and inconsiderate, especially when I think and worry about my colleagues in Ukraine, who are even risking their lives to protect their natural history collections for the reasons described in this letter, including Examples 1 and 2 below.
While the Sternberg Museum acts as a custodian responsible for maintaining specimens from the federal lands for the U.S. government and for the people of the U.S., as a state museum, all other Sternberg specimens are the property of the state of Kansas, meaning they too belong to the public, especially to the people of Kansas.
As such, your personal decision to potentially sell the ‘public specimens’ to private buyers should never have even been a possibility in the first place, and it must never happen.
This brings me to my request for clarification. It is now public knowledge that “employees [of the Sternberg Museum] were told to develop a reliable catalog of the holdings."
To the scientific community, this directive of yours and additional information provided in the article and other reporting (e.g., potentially moving the collections elsewhere) can only be interpreted as you have not dismissed the possibility of selling specimens in the Sternberg’s permanent collections to private buyers.
Based on the information provided in this letter, including Examples 1 and 2 below (and in my Sept. 30 letter), is the idea of possibly selling Sternberg’s specimens, even parts of them, still on ‘pause’ and has the potential to resume, or is it now off the table completely?
I surely hope that the latter is the case, and I would truly appreciate it if you could confirm this through a formal public statement as soon as possible so that my colleagues throughout the world and I can take a deep breath and sleep better.
I should also add that expeditiously developing “a reliable catalog of the holdings” is an unreasonable expectation given the serious shortage of staff and experts dedicated to collections management at the Sternberg.
However, I believe the immediate priority for the Sternberg Museum staff should be to shift their attention to developing the “Sternberg Funding Model 2.0” with you and other members of the university community (without worrying about potentially commercializing any parts of the permanent collections or moving the collections elsewhere as options).
As someone who loves to drive on dirt roads and through small rural towns in west-central Kansas with topographic maps scribbled with 30 years' worth of fossil collecting notes (even risking getting stuck in mud or having a flat tire in the ‘middle of nowhere’), I know firsthand that people in the region already have limited access to educational resources.
Until the hearing, I was also deeply concerned about people in many smaller towns along I-70 between Salina and Denver in terms of their economy, besides potentially weakening their K-12 education and beyond.
So, thank you for your commitment to keeping the Sternberg Museum open. If I may leave one piece of advice before I close this letter, rather than only delegating the tasks to your other FHSU administrators, I strongly urge you to also personally pay visits to the museum in person from time to time and talk to your staff, FHSU students who use the museum for their academic endeavors, and volunteers, and ask them about their activities, accomplishments, needs, concerns, and most importantly, well-being.
You may also happen to run into one or more visiting researchers from other states or even other countries, and you may even consider observing educational activities or joining a paleontology field trip or two next summer with youngsters participating in the ‘Sternberg Museum Science Camp’: https://sternberg.fhsu.edu/education-outreach/science-camps/index.html.
In summer 2025, I volunteered to host a Sternberg camp at my university in Chicago as a satellite site with two local paleontologists as instructors.
Although my role was small relative to the instructors’, it was refreshing to interact with a dozen or so enthusiastic participating high schoolers from coast to coast, showing my research lab with many Sternberg specimens under active scientific study and sharing my love for west-central Kansas and its paleontology.
— Kenshu Shimada,
FHSU alumnus