What the Academy of Natural Sciences Museum Closure Tells Every Cultural Organization About Sustainability

September in Philadelphia, and the news from the Parkway is not good. On September 1, Drexel University President Antonio Merlo and Suzanne Biemiller, chair of the Academy’s board of trustees, put out a joint statement with no hedging in it: the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University will close its public museum on September 30, 2026. The last day with regular hours is Sunday, September 27. And Scott Cooper, who had been the institution’s president and CEO for nearly nine years, stepped down immediately when the news went out.

I have walked past the building at 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway more times than I can count, most of them without really registering what I was passing. The institution inside that building was founded in 1812 by seven people who decided that the young country needed a formal home for natural science. Importers, distillers, bankers, Quakers, all of them drawn together by the same conviction that the study of the natural world deserved a permanent institution in Philadelphia. They have been proved right for two centuries. That run, at least in its form as something the public can walk into off the street, ends this month.

The Academy Is Not Disappearing

I want to be precise about this because the initial reading of the news, and I include my own first reaction here, can blur an important line. The Academy of Natural Sciences is not closing. Its scientific research continues. Its collections are not being dispersed or auctioned off. The Academy’s own statement uses the phrase “fundamental changes in the economics of the Academy’s operational model” and commits to identifying “new and financially sustainable opportunities for the public display of elements from its collections.” Drexel remains the steward of the collections. The scientists are still there.

Talks are ongoing. Former Comcast executive and former U.S. Ambassador to Canada David L. Cohen is working as a facilitator designated by Governor Josh Shapiro’s office. Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration is also at the table. What those conversations produce, and whether they produce anything before September 30, is unclear as of this writing. What is clear is that the research mission of an institution over two centuries old is not shutting down with the museum galleries.

What does shut down is the museum itself. The public entrance. The thing that brought families, school groups, and generations of Philadelphia children through the front door. And that loss, for an institution that has operated as a public museum since 1828, is significant. It is not the same as the institution ending, but it is not a minor administrative adjustment either.

Two Hundred Years in the Room at Logan Square

The building at the corner of Race and 19th Streets moved to that location in 1876, the year of the Centennial Exhibition in this same city. The Academy’s site sits at the edge of Logan Square, on what had been a remote lot when the building committee purchased it in 1868 and what became, over the following decades, the heart of Philadelphia’s civic and cultural district. The original Victorian Gothic structure has been heavily remodeled over the years, and what stands there now reflects more than a century of changes. But the institution inside it has been continuous.

A Billy Penn piece from July 2026 noted that the Academy mounted the first publicly displayed dinosaur skeleton in America in 1868, and charged visitors ten cents to see it. The collection that has grown from those early acquisitions is something of a different scale entirely. More than 19 million biological specimens, fossils, archives and scientific resources, according to the Drexel announcement. More than 73,000 type specimens, which are the reference specimens scientists around the world use when identifying and classifying species. A library and archives with more than 75,000 titles, including rare volumes dating back to 1529. Materials from Charles Darwin’s home. Audubon items. Lewis and Clark’s herbarium. Dinosaur Hall, with bones and casts that have stopped children in their tracks since the nineteenth century.

None of that goes anywhere on September 30. But the door that let the public near it does close, and the question of what replaces it has not been answered yet.

The Economics Behind the Decision

The stated reason is consistent across every source. WHYY’s reporting describes the museum as a casualty of the COVID pandemic’s lasting effect on visitation. The Academy’s leadership and Drexel’s leadership say the same thing: attendance did not come back the way it was expected to, operating costs kept rising, and what had been a workable model became unworkable. The museum had already cut its operating hours from five days a week to three days a week in 2025. It cancelled its summer science camp earlier in 2026. The reductions were not enough.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s reporting adds numbers that help calibrate the scale of what Drexel was carrying. The university provided $8.288 million in operational support in fiscal year 2025, and $8.914 million the year before that. Twenty seven of the Academy’s eighty employees will be directly affected by the closure. Those are not abstract figures. They represent the weight of institutional commitment that was holding the museum up, and the weight of what stops when it closes.

The Academy’s situation is also not unique to Philadelphia or to this institution. The American Alliance of Museums published survey data in late 2025 showing that museums across the country were facing their worst financial picture since the pandemic. One third of surveyed institutions reported cancelled government grants or contracts, most frequently from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Art Newspaper reported in January 2026 that total revenue for the U.S. nonprofit culture sector fell 36 percent between 2019 and 2024 when measured against inflation. The Academy of Natural Sciences is not an outlier. It is an early and prominent example of a problem affecting institutions of every size across the sector.

Funding and Sustainability Are Not the Same Thing

Here is the argument I keep returning to, and I think it is the one this moment is asking for.

We spend a great deal of time talking about funding the arts, funding cultural institutions, funding science education. Those conversations matter. Grants matter. Philanthropy matters. Public funding matters. The Drexel operational subsidy, running eight to nine million dollars a year in recent years, demonstrates exactly what serious institutional commitment looks like. And yet here we are.

The problem is that funding and sustainability, while related, are not the same question. A grant answers how we pay for things next year. A business model answers how an institution generates enough of its own revenue to remain viable over time, across multiple years, across changes in the grant environment, across changes in what the federal government decides to fund. An institution can have access to serious philanthropic and governmental and university support, and still not have a model that works without them.

The Academy of Natural Sciences had nearly two centuries of history. It had institutional prestige that money cannot manufacture. It had Drexel’s backing. It had exhibits that no other institution in Philadelphia could replicate. And it still reached a point where the economics of operating a public museum stopped working. If that combination of assets is not enough to make a model viable indefinitely, then every smaller cultural organization in Philadelphia needs to take seriously the question of what its own model actually is, separate from what it raises year to year in grants.

What This Means for Every Smaller Organization in This City

Part of what I do through my work with the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia is think about economic and civic infrastructure at an institutional level. The frame I return to from food systems work applies directly here: the difference between addressing a problem today and building something that does not produce that problem on an ongoing basis.

An institution can be beloved, can be important, can hold objects that exist nowhere else on earth, and still not have a model that generates enough of its own revenue to survive outside of subsidy. That is not a moral failing. It is a structural problem. And the time to confront that structural problem is before the economics stop working, not at the moment of crisis when the options narrow and the timeline is thirty days.

The small theater that everybody loves. The jazz club that has been in the same building for twenty years. The gallery that anchors its block. None of those institutions has Drexel’s balance sheet standing behind them. If the Academy, with all of what it had behind it, could reach this point, then the conversation about cultural sustainability in Philadelphia cannot end with the amount raised in this year’s grant cycle. It has to reach a harder question: what does this institution offer that its audience actually needs, how does it reach people who have not found it yet, and is there a model here that generates enough of its own momentum to be standing in another decade regardless of what any grant committee decides?

What Comes Next

NBC10 Philadelphia reported that talks between the Academy’s leadership, Drexel, Governor Shapiro’s office, and Mayor Parker’s administration were still active at the time of the closure announcement. David Cohen is at the table. Both administrations have said publicly that they want a path forward for access to the collections. What that path looks like has not been announced.

The building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway is not going anywhere. The 19 million specimens are not going anywhere. The 75,000 volumes in the archives, including the ones from 1529, are not going anywhere. The question of whether a Philadelphian can walk in off the street and stand near a dinosaur skeleton, the way Philadelphians have been doing since 1868, is still open. That is the question this city’s civic conversation still needs to answer.